Studio Kâulak
Via Alcalá, 12. Madrid
Antonio Cánovas del Castillo y Vallejo, better known by the pseudonym Kâulak (Madrid, 22 December 1862 - Madrid, 13 September 1933), was a well-known Spanish photographer, grandson of the great politician Antonio Cánovas del Castillo.In addition to being a photographer, he was a politician, art critic and painter, an activity in which he used the pseudonym 'Vascano'. In 1901, he collaborated with photographers of Swiss origin, Oscar Hauser and Adolfo Menet, who had founded a graphic arts company in Madrid, with several photographs taken in the city of Cuenca to turn them into postcards.His amateur photographic activity was extraordinary, within the Pictorialist current, participating in numerous national and international competitions and exhibitions between 1899 and 1904, in which he won more than twenty prizes (Paris, London, Brussels, Nice, St Petersburg, Genoa, Barcelona, Zaragoza and Madrid). He collaborated in the creation of the Madrid Photographic Society and founded the magazine La Fotografia in 1901, which he directed until 1913 and in which he published more than three hundred articles. Between 1901 and 1905 he published hundreds of postcards, some of whose series were marketed by the millions. In the second period, limited between 1904 and 1933, he operated the Kâulak studio at 4 Alcalá Street, 12, one of the most popular and prestigious in Madrid, where he portrayed the royal family, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. He took part in the National Assembly of 1905 and in the creation of the General Society of Photographers of Spain that emerged from the event, and in 1918 he co-founded the national society of entrepreneurs Unión Fotográfica for which he directed the magazine of the same name. He wrote several books based on his experience, including The Transformation of Photography (1906), Modern Photography (1912) and El retoque fotográfico (1921), organised the archive of his studio in order to elaborate an iconography, and published in the best illustrated magazines his portraits collected images of the most important politicians of his time such as Antonio Maura, writers such as José de Echegaray, comrades of the Real Sociedad Fotográfica such as Guirao Girada and bullfighters such as Manuel Granero, as well as the royal family.
