The current Joan Colom retrospective exhibition at Museu Nacional is the reason for this one-day conference, which aims at providing a new context for understanding Colom’s work in its larger historical context.

The program is divided in two parts. The first part traces the hegemony of humanist and neorealist discourses in post-war photography in Europe and North America. Largely historicized according to the ideological conditions of the cultural Cold War in the West, post-war documentary photography was characteristically promoting peaceful notions of social integration of the lower classes in the then emerging welfare state by means of images of universal fraternity. The Family of Man exhibition from 1955 was the monument of this poetics. This is the context of Colom’s arrival to photographic culture.

The second part of the conference is an approach to the ethic and political issues raised by Colom’s clandestine photography method. It also aims at offering a context for a reading of Colom’s work as a contribution to a urban history of the informal and vernacular uses of public space in Barcelona in the period between Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s and the post-Olympic neoliberal city after the 1990s, with the successful social-democratic urban experiment of the 1980s Barcelona in between.