PHotoESPAÑA exhibition “Català-Roca. The lucidity of the gaze»

In the different cities of the Spanish geography, Català-Roca portrayed a compendium of our recent history in images: its people, culture, traditions and ways of life, showing the changes that were taking place in the country's economy and architecture, which began to recover little by little from the ravages of the Civil War. His photographs make us witnesses of an era, of a Spain in black and white in which some changes are already noted.

Along with the mythical images of the Gran Vía or the Madrid Metro and the portraits of figures such as Salvador Dalí or Joan Miró, the exhibition brings us closer to other unknown and unpublished images such as some family photographs or those taken in color during his stay in New York in the late XNUMXs. His facet as a portraitist shows us both the poverty of marginal neighborhoods, with images of street vendors, errand boys, shoe shiners or potters, as well as the elegance of the bourgeoisie that attends the Lyceum.

Català-Roca's personal style was consolidated in the fifties, after having worked from the age of thirteen in his father's experimental photography laboratory, opening his own at twenty-six. He knew how to combine the technical knowledge acquired during this stage with the photographic trends of the interwar period and put them at the service of a photograph that would account for the reality of the country in which he lived. This resulted in works as outstanding as those he did in Madrid and Barcelona, ​​both books published by the Editorial Destino in 1954.

His multidisciplinary work is not limited to humanistic documentary photography, but also develops an important corpus of photography of architecture, portraits, industrial photography, ceramics and crafts, art, as well as numerous documentaries, among which stand out Barcelona in autumn (1951) Living stones (1952) o Salineros of Ibiza (1954)

Starting in the XNUMXs, he focused his work and research on color photography, which he conceived as a new language and a necessary and natural form, although he never completely abandoned his work in black and white.