Joan Colom. Photographs of Barcelona, 1958-1964; Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports and Fundación Telefónica present for the first time a retrospective on the early period of this artist, winner of the National Award in Photography.
The exhibit, which also contains his new work, consists of three series: “The Street”, which offers a trip through the red light district (today called Raval) with clandestine photos of the most marginalized part of Barcelona in the late 1950’s and early ´60’s; “El Born”, which visits this city market and displays the trades that were practiced there; and “El Somorrostro”, with photos from this gypsy neighborhood in the Poblenou area.
Its organizers, David Balsells and Jorge Ribalta, comment that this exhibit represents an historical and critical vision of the impact of Colom’s photographs on the popular imagination of Barcelona and its transformations
The exhibit was produced by the Office of Fine Arts Promotion at the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports and by Fundación Telefónica. It was designed to be the first retrospective centered on the early period of this artist, from 1958 to 1964. Immediately after this period Colom discontinues his work until the decade of the eighties. The early photos are taken, for the most part, of daily life in the old red light district (today called the Raval neighborhood). The artist commented at the time that “this is the only place in Barcelona where I see humankind”.
The black and white photographs, utterly human in content, had to be taken in a hidden and discrete manner, due to the conflictive nature of the scenes. The result is a photographic body with enormous historical, sociological and documentary value.
An 8 mm. film which Colom made in 1960 completes the exhibit. This is considered a fundamental piece in his early set of work, one in which he tries to express everything that he could not with his photos.
Joan Colom (Barcelona, 1921), winner of Spain’s National Award in Photography 2002, belongs to a generation of Spanish photographers who, in the second half of the nineteen-fifties, renewed photographic language and brought this art into the avant-garde of the time. Colom was one of the precursors of working in photographic series. According to critic Josep María Casademont, Colom’s generation is that of the “new avant-garde”, with colleagues such as Miserachs, Maspons and Masats, all drawing inspiration from the work of Català-Roca and his book on Barcelona (1954). Colom’s influences came from the modern photographers of Paris (Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Man Ray and Doisneau) and those of New York (Walker Evans, William Klein, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt and Robert Frank).
“THE STREET”, A WALK THROUGH THE RED LIGHT DISTRICT
The first series of the exhibit contains the work Joan Colom began in 1958, with only one year of experience in photography. He began to take pictures of the streets in Barcelona’s red light district. Until 1961 Colom continued his quest to take photos of the “dregs of society” while going unnoticed. He would take pictures without looking through the viewfinder and press the shutter from a camera below his waist. The result is a masterful combination of avant-garde photo-essay and a faithful portrait of the poorest working class of Barcelona, the disadvantaged, the prostitutes, the children, and the atmospheres around the boarding houses used for sexual encounters.
After three years of striving to take the difficult snapshots that would truly reflect life in the red light district, Colom did an individual exhibit in 1961 at the Aixelà Salon in Barcelona, which then traveled throughout Spain. Then in 1964 he published these images in a book published by Lumenm, Izas, rabizas y colipoterras, with text by Camilo José Cela. The controversy that arose from this publication influenced Colom’s decision to temporarily distance himself from photography. He returned to it in the eighties.
In the opinion of the exhibit’s organizers, these pictures represent “the strange combination of the avant-garde modernism of the fifties with the pessimistic tradition and the anti-modern imagination of “Dark Spain”. Thus, Colom’s photos are a unique document of the psychological and social climate of Barcelona under Franco’s regime.
«EL BORN», DAILY LIFE IN THE MARKETPLACE
This second series, done by Colom in 1963 at the old public marketplace “El Born” looks into the work atmosphere and the trades practiced there.
A great deal of this was done with Ignasi Marroyo, another member of the El Mussol group and Colom’s professional assistant in 1963 and ’64. This small series is part of a larger body of work which Marroyo has continued with until today.
«EL SOMORROSTRO»: THE BORDERS OF THE CITY
The third and last series presented was done in January of 1964 for the newspaper, El Correo Catalán, also with the collaboration of Ignasi Marroyo. It deals with the arrival of the Coastal Promenade to the shanty area in the Somorrostro neighborhood. In total four photo-essays were published in the newspaper’s magazine supplement from January to March of this 1964.
The gypsy neighborhood of Somorrostro, located next to the sea in the Poblenou area, was known for its extreme poverty. Today the area of this old neighborhood and that of the other marketplace series (“El Born”) is a highly developed part of Barcelona, housing the convention center for Fòrum 2004. For this reason the organizers want to “offer a critical memory of the city’s popular classes”.
