Bathers comprises an extensive set of anonymous photographs of semi-naked boys, scarcely covered by a swimsuit and pictured in contact with nature. Boys who appear outdoors: by beaches, swimming pools, in the countryside, beside lakes or rivers, recreating the traditional iconography of bathers that has enjoyed a high profile throughout the history of art.

This exhibition project is framed within the line of work widely developed internationally (but practically unknown in Spain), in which the abovementioned democratic, anonymous, neglected, poor and vulgar photographic material, by virtue of the taste, knowledge and aesthetic reason of creators and collectors becomes a cultural artefact, an artistic production, an editorial project. This is precisely what Bathers aims to be.

Xosé M. Buxán Bran, associate professor of Vigo University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, acts in this case as a combination of collector, creator, curator, academic researcher and exhumer of the dispersed and almost extinct material that these photographs found represent and which, although quite ordinary, are made extraordinary by the sense and meaning given to them by this author and compiler.