October 2000
The Fading Ghost of General Franco
It was 25 years ago next month, but in my mind it was only yesterday.

When the death of General Francisco Franco briefly made US headlines in November 1975, it seemed an afterthought, a postscript to an old man who had ruled Spain with absolute power for 37 years. For most Americans his name was from another country and another era, irrelevant to the times.

But Franco’s death was not lost on the cast of a wacky new television show. He became a joke. Every week, a picture of the General in a military uniform would flash on the screen during Saturday Night Live’s fake newscast and Chevy Chase would deadpan to the camera, "this just in ….. Generalisimo Francisco Franco is still dead." And we laughed for months. The Me Generation was underway and we were busy trying to forget Vietnam and the Nixon Years. Spain was a place far, far away.

I realized how little I knew about the Spain of today when viewing the work of London-based photographer Michael Williams. Williams has made the people and places of Spain a personal project for the last three years; his pictures tell a story of a revolution underway, a people casting off the ghost of General Franco, celebrating the regional differences forbidden under his regime. The photographs will draw you in; you’ll find yourself asking questions about them, what's going on here? what is that man doing holding the balls? where are the old couple going? And underneath it all, the hint of violence implicit in the graffiti sprayed on monument walls, "Esto no es España, esto es Andalucia."
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