Many years, almost to the hour, before the date when I was born, one Eric Arthur Blair - better known as George Orwell - was nearly killed by a bullet from the Fascist lines, as he was fighting with the anarchist POUM brigades on the Republican side on the Aragon front and in Barcelona in 1937, during the second year of the Spanish Civil War.
He survived the ordeal and the chaotic times that followed, and went on to write the seminal Homage to Catalonia, a first hand account of his experiences of that brutal conflict, and of the bitter in-fighting and struggle for power within the left that ended in their eventual defeat and to the vicious authoritarian dictatorship led by General Franco for nearly forty years afterwards.
A decade before, Orwell had spent five years in Burma as an imperial policeman in what was then a province of India under the British Raj. His experience of injustice and discrimination against the local native population by the authorities he represented changed him into the radical thinker he later became. It also led him to write Burmese Days and other chronicles and novels that set him apart as one of the most important and influential writers of the last century.
Like so many other young people of my generation, I was profoundly touched by his writings. As a student in my native Uruguay, I was involved in protest and demonstrations against the right-wing military coup in the 1970s, which led me to a spell in prison and a long exile. The similar patterns of fascist repression coupled with the internal fighting of the progressive forces of the left in neighbouring Chile, ending in the harsh and protracted dictatorship of Pinochet, mirrored Orwell's experiences from earlier decades.
His prophetic 1984 foresaw the surveillance society we live in nowadays and his chronicles of social inequality in marginalized communities in the north of England remain as relevant today as they were in the 1930s.
A few years ago, I went to follow the thread of his Burmese story by documenting the original locations in present day Myanmar. I wrote a travelogue and then combined my images with excerpts from the original novel as captions for many of the photos. (photo below: Myanmar)
The project was originally shown at the Frontline Club in London, at the launch of one of the annual editions of the Orwell Prize for political writing.
I then decided to follow up my calling and join the visual narrative of his earlier experiences in South East Asia with that of the Spanish Civil War, a quest that took me to Catalonia and Aragon, the main settings of his historical account of those hostilities that were to become a preamble to the Second World War (main picture above).
I was later moved to trace his steps in Morocco, where he went with Eileen, his first wife, to recover from his chronic bronchitis in 1939. They spent six months in the Marrakesh area, where he wrote ‘Coming up for air’ and also a powerful short essay which focused on the poor living and working conditions of the local population under French colonial rule.
Imagining Orwell in Three Continents by Julio Etchard is published by Just Press
