To know more about Photography

To know more about Photography

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The aim of the museum is to bring together works from the origins of photography until the present day, in a representative collection of the history of this art form and especially of Catalan photography.  The collection takes a trip through the different artistic movements that starts with examples of the initial uses of photography, with works by A. A. Disdéri, Jean Laurent, Le Jeune and Charles Clifford.

This is followed by pictorialism, that uses pigmentary techniques to give the photograph the appearance of a painting. A singular and ground-breaking style that also recovers the values of fine arts in the revolutionary modernity. Pictorialism was maintained in Catalonia until 1950, with authors as important as Pere Casas Abarca, José Ortiz-Echagüe and Antoni Campanyà. Within this field it is also worth highlighting the more avant-garde contributions of Josep Masana, Josep Batlles, Pere Català Pic and Emili Godes.

A separate section is dedicated to the Spanish Civil War, which illustrates the birth of modern photographic reports, illustrated magazines and small-sized cameras capable of capturing images at high speed.  As such, the war became a major theatre for experimenting with new technical possibilities and of massive reproduction that would receive extensive coverage in the printed media, with photographers such as  Robert Capa or Agustí Centelles.

The aesthetics of the reporting would mark the modern photography of the post-war period, in which realism would coexist with visual experimentations and the aspirations for abstract forms of the first avant-garde movements.  The respect for these principles would mark the so-called New Avant-garde, the term coined in Catalonia by the critic and historian Josep Maria Casademont to call the photographic aesthetic that would dominate between the decade of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. 

This New Avant-garde was represented by Otho Lloyd and Joaquim Gomis, and continued with the new realism of Francesc Català Roca, Joan Colom, Leopoldo Pomés, Oriol Maspons and Xavier Miserachs, amongst others.  The collection is completed with the most recent production of Catalan photography, such as that of Manel Armengol, Joan Fontcuberta or Pere Formiguera.

Fotografia - Catàleg