While I was showering, my mother knocked on the bathroom door. She asked me if something had happened because she heard a very loud noise. She then went up to the rooftop, from where the entire airport runway could be seen, came back down, and said to me: ‘Run, Miguel, run; it’s an accident!’ I grabbed the camera and, when I was about 200 or 300 meters away, there was a huge explosion. It felt like a sudden blow of air from a hairdryer. It threw me backwards. But I got up and made my way to the scene. I took photos where you could see a man missing his legs with a briefcase in hand, and the burned pilot with his back turned…
The above account is the story told by photographer Miguel Hernández (La Laguna, 1958) about his experiences in the Los Rodeos disaster on March 27, 1977. The worst catastrophe in commercial aviation history was also, on a personal level, the most defining episode of his professional career. What he saw and felt that afternoon was profound, but so was what happened with the photos he claims to have taken. Hernández asserts that his camera and film were confiscated, and that the film disappeared, and later the images were published in numerous media outlets without his name. He refers to the most widely circulated photos of the crash. “They appeared in Time, in magazines like Zoom, in Interviú, in all the media…,” he lists.
At that time, Miguel, an 18-year-old boy, lived on Cabildo Street, near what is now the area of warehouses and the football field in the El Coromoto neighbourhood. This is a location surprisingly close to the now named Tenerife North-Ciudad de La Laguna Airport. It could be said to be right by the runway. Moreover, the place had no fence at the time of the events. So he just had to leave the bathroom, quickly get dressed, cross a water channel, and start photographing the tragedy with his Zenit E camera.
“At one point, a security guard, armed with a rifle, approached me and asked me to hand over the camera,” he reminisces. “At first, I hesitated, but he took it from me and handed it to a firetruck of firefighters and told me to come by the Traffic office at the airport to pick it up in a few days,” he asserts. “I returned home and recounted what had happened, and I felt terrible because of the smell of burnt flesh, which I will never forget,” he adds.
He claims that, days later, he returned to collect the camera and managed to retrieve it, but the film was missing. He had lost those snapshots of the initial moments of the crash. Miguel was working as a waiter at the Real Club de Golf de Tenerife in Tacoronte. “I mentioned there what had happened, how I experienced it, and what I photographed. Rodolfo Machado von Tschusi, who was also the president of the Club and later the CEO of CEOE in Tenerife, details,” he explains. Shortly after, trying to forget what had happened, he received a call from London that would intensify his discontent. On the other end of the phone line was Machado, who had seen the images Miguel had described published in the English capital.
“I took the first photos of the jumbos, they took the film and my work has never been credited with any signature,” summarises this professional, who also admits he has no concrete evidence. “If one day this is revealed, they should look at the negatives. I say it’s a Valca brand and even the position it is,” he states. “I have always said the following: on the day they come to me with the photos or show me the negative and say it’s Agfa, Kodak, or whatever, then I will publicly apologise,” he insists.
Donation of his archive. Miguel Hernández wanders through the alleys of his memory and ends up at that bitter memory of the Los Rodeos accident when analysing his professional career. He recently decided to donate his photos of the municipality to the El Rosario Town Hall and will be the curator of the exhibition titled Chronicles of a Town, which will take place next summer as part of the celebrations in honour of Our Lady of La Esperanza. “These are people who willingly posed and whom I want to pay a small tribute to,” points out the photographer about the show’s protagonists, who, although born and raised in La Laguna, consider themselves adopted rosarians. He has been living in the centre of La Esperanza for decades, had the Fototienda Zoom studio there, and worked for the City Council for a long time.
Passion for photography. “My interest in photography began in 1971, coinciding with the eruption of the Teneguía volcano,” he places the starting point of his connection with this discipline. He was in school, and the father of a classmate who sold photographic products brought a snapshot of that natural event on the island of La Palma. “As a result of that, I started to become interested in photography, but, as we were a humble family, I couldn’t afford to buy a camera,” he continues. A stroke of luck came his way: “We did a football betting pool in class, and after the prize distribution, we each received 200 pesetas.” He was able to acquire a Kodak Fiesta, and his hobby continued to grow. Some correspondence courses followed. “Every month they sent me the chemicals and an instruction book on how to prepare them. I used to do my first developing processes in my mother’s kitchen with four Duralex soup plates and at night, so it was dark,” he recalls. The next step, getting an enlarger, seemed unattainable to him. “The solution was a five-litre oil can and an old broken camera that I placed underneath as a lens for the enlarger,” he explains.
The hospitality industry. Family economics forced him to take on other occupations. Paradoxically, it was a work chapter that distanced him and at the same time brought him closer to the world of photography. With a salary in his pocket, he was able to buy that Zenit E camera for 1,000 pesetas that he would use in Los Rodeos. “With it, I went to village dances, street parties, popular festivals and offered myself as a photographer, developing in black and white and earning my hard-earned money,” he recounts. Practice gave him confidence and he learned new techniques as best he could. “Any photography magazine there was, I bought,” he points out. During his time as a waiter at the Real Club de Golf, he took photos for the entity’s archive, for a specialized magazine and for local media. The same thing happened in his next job. “From there, I went to work as the director of the Used Vehicles Department at Autensa Renault and I continued to take care of the photography tasks,” he explains. Finally, in the 90s, he decided to take the plunge and dedicate himself professionally to his true passion.
His studies. Miguel Hernández opened his first studio in his neighbourhood, in El Coromoto. He then set his sights on other business horizons. “I realised that here, in La Esperanza, and in the municipality of El Rosario as a whole, there was nothing, not even a place to make a photocopy,” he points out. And he chose to keep the location in La Laguna and start up the one in La Esperanza, before venturing with a third one at the Elcano Shopping Centre, in Radazul Bajo. Those were different times. Later on, the emergence of digital photography forced him to take steps back. He first closed the one in La Laguna, then the one in Radazul, and kept the one in the centre of La Esperanza, which he had open for 25 years.
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Media. This photography professional carried out work for the El Rosario City Council and also collaborated with different newspapers, such as La Tarde, Diario de Avisos, La Gaceta de Canarias, La Opinión de Tenerife and EL DÍA. When he looks back, he remembers a time when he made copies of the photos taken for the City Council and had to go from newspaper to newspaper distributing them. Among the main events he was present at, he recalls, in addition to the “jumbo” plane crash, the forest fire of the 90s that affected the forest of La Esperanza. “Although there is always a special anecdote, something unique in every festivity and event…,” he says. “In all the years I’ve been in photography, I have shed tears when I realised that I have been at the baptism, first communion, wedding and baptism of the child,” he adds. The overall outcome is positive: “It has been 30 years of everything: of feelings, work and something very important, like all those friends and people that remain in the drawer of memories.”
