Colom joined the Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya (Photographic Association of Catalonia) in 1957. His photo-salon work began in 1958 and went on until 1960, when he explicitly gave up taking part in amateur photographic competitions.
The first group of pictures from 1957 corresponds to the period between his joining the Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya and his earliest submissions to competitions. Colom has preserved this group in a box marked ‘my first photographs’.
The main series from Colom’s photo-salon activity consists of the pictures of Easter processions. Some of them he submitted to competitions and published in photo-magazines. The photographs of the foreign sailors and the street flirting foreshadow Colom’s work in the streets of the Barri Xino, and the transition from the images of the traditional Easter celebrations and rituals is also reflected in a small series of colour slides.
The El Mussol (little owl) group was formed in September 1960. It consisted of four Barcelona photographers –Joan Colom, Jordi Munt, Enric Garcia Pedret and Ignasi Marroyo– and another four from Terrassa –Josep Albero, Antoni Boada, Josep Bros and Jordi Vilaseca–. The group had the drive and the support of the critic Josep Maria Casademont, who presented its two only exhibitions, at Aixelà, the gallery he directed, in 1960 and 1962.
The first of these exhibitions was held just two months after the group as such was formed. It was therefore a showcase for the individual work in progress of each one of the photographers.
The second exhibition, in 1962, was a reportage on the IV Sitges Rally for vintage cars and it was put together in barely two weeks. It was presented as a ‘group reportage’, in which ‘none of the photographs has the photographer’s name on it … they want the photographer in each case to be simply El Mussol’ and it was the result of ‘strict team work’.
Some members of El Mussol were part of the team who shot the documentary on the painter Josep Maria de Sucre, a film made by Francesc de Lasa in 1964.
This part of the exhibition presents the central core of Colom’s work, most of which was done with a hidden camera, shooting from the hip and without looking through the viewfinder. This work forms the basis for his recognition as a great photographer. It consists of various series, of which the core is the body of fifty photographs presented in the exhibition at Aixelà in 1961 with the title The Street. Based on the sequence of subject matter in the exhibition, which began with children and characters in the street and ended with the red-light district of the Barri Xino, the series presented here includes three bodies of work and a film:
- A first group of images of people in the street has aesthetic links to the images of the anonymous public of the Easter rituals and includes a number of pictures of children.
- The fifty images from the exhibition at Aixelà, presented in the same order in which they were exhibited at the time.
- The bulk of the images centring on prostitution and published in Camilo José Cela’s book Izas, rabizas y colipoterras, which was released in the famous Palabra e Imagen collection by Editorial Lumen in 1964.
- The 8 mm film Colom made in about 1960 at the same time as he was taking photographs. This was a one-off experiment in film, made using the same technique of keeping the camera hidden.
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Once fotógrafos españoles a París (Eleven Spanish Photographers to Paris) was an initiative of the official French tourist service in Barcelona, coordinated by the photographer Eugeni Forcano. Taking part, as well as Colom and Forcano himself, were Oriol Maspons, Andreu Basté, Leonardo Cantero, Gabriel Cualladó, Joan Cubaró, Francisco Gómez, Ramon Masats, Xavier Miserachs and Francisco Ontañón.
The idea was to produce promotional images of Paris that would avoid the coldness and commonplaces of official tourist propaganda and lists of monuments and would show everyday life.
The photographers worked in Paris for one week in May 1962. The exhibition, consisting of about one hundred images, was put on at Aixelà from 6 to 18 November that same year and at the Galería Biosca in Madrid from 10 to 31 December. As well as the enlargements, Cantero presented an elaborate album of photographs with the title Gentes de París (People of Paris), in which he included a considerably larger selection than the one he hung on the wall.
Colom’s partnership with Ignasi Marroyo began in the framework of the photo-outings by the El Mussol group, but it took on a different slant directed at professionalization. In Colom’s case, this professionalization was frustrated. Marroyo, on the other hand, continued a certain professional activity when he moved to Rubí in 1964. The partnership between Colom and Marroyo stands out for the work for the Correo Catalán in 1964, with the reportage on the Somorrostro as the core, and their project on bullfighting for a book that was eventually shelved.
There is also a reportage by Colom on a part of the SEAT car factory’s installations, taken with a large-format camera. This is the only surviving record of work by him using this type of camera, presumably a Linhof he bought and then sold again soon afterwards.
The clandestine reportage on a court case for the magazine Gaceta Ilustrada was done for Oriol Maspons, the magazine’s photographer. The practice of clandestine shooting links Colom to detective methods and the sensationalist press. In view of his acknowledged skills acquired in the Barri Xino, Maspons asked Colom to take clandestine pictures of the trial of Mr Rovirosa, a case commonly known as the murder of Aragon Street, which took place in November 1962, making a big splash in the newspapers of the time and drawing widespread public attention. Colom got a press pass and took the photographs with his camera hidden under a raincoat. Some of the pictures were published in the magazine in March 1964.
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The selection from the thematic albums of black and white working prints consists of one page per section and is presented with its repetitions and inconsistencies, just as they appear in the albums. In this way the conceptual structure of the archives can be revealed.
In the albums of colour prints the subjects are mixed up and the main criteria for organisation seems to be chronological.
Although Colom gradually resumed his walks camera in hand in the Rambla and the surrounding streets as from the late 1970s, it was only after 1990 that he returned to full activity. He very soon incorporated colour, which he alternated indiscriminately with black and white. After 2010 there seems to have been a stop to his activity.
With the recovery of his photographic activity in 1990 came a reorganisation of his archives. Colom has always described himself as a collector of his own images, which seems to be a way of expressing an ‘archival unconscious’. The particular thematic arrangement of his archives determined what photographs Colom shot.
Colom uses the numbers 1 to 31 in classifying his images by subject matter, both in these prints and in his individually cut and framed negatives. As we can see, the arrangement by subject matter contains repetitions and inconsistencies, as it begins with geographical criteria and then changes to thematic criteria, which can be relatively precise or very vague. Some of these categories are very broad and others are small and seem to have been established just to classify a certain series or closed group of images. There are also inconsistencies in the use of the same number for different subjects.
1-29_-229281-000.jpg [11]
1-17_-229270-000.jpg [12]
1-7-229231-000.jpg [13]
1-1-229239-000.jpg [14]
2-31_-009098-000.jpg [16]
2-20_-009085-000.jpg [17]
2-5_-229373-000.jpg [19]
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4-34_-009563-000.jpg [23]
4-30_-0002.jpg [24]
4-17_-216057-000.jpg [25]
4-5_-229243-000.jpg [26]
5-50_-225978-000.jpg [28]
5-23_-238398-000.jpg [30]
5-9_-238423-000.jpg [31]
6-60_-106.jpg [10]
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«‘I didn't know I was doing social photography at that time. I just took photographs and went after pictures I found exciting. I’ve sometimes used the term to describe my work, but to me it just means I don’t do landscapes or still lifes. I work the street. I try, through my photographs, to be a kind of notary of an age’.» Joan Colom, 1999
The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya is presenting the first major exhibition devoted to the photographer Joan Colom, fruit of a laborious task of researching and cataloguing his extensive archive, which he himself donated to the museum in 2012. Joan Colom (Barcelona, 1921) is one of the most important Spanish photographers of the second half of the 20th century, one of the great renovators of post-war photography and, quite unintentionally, the pioneer of photojournalism in our country.
We are proposing an immersion in Colom’s universe through more than 500 photographs spanning the whole of his career. Here you can see his best-known images, taken almost clandestinely in the 1960s in the red-light district of Barcelona’s Barrio Chino: black and white photographs of street life that have become icons. You’ll also discover Colom’s less familiar side through the reportages he did from the 1990s, where he started to use colour and which are now on show to the public for the first time.
Collaborate:
Exhibition catalogue I work the Street. Joan Colom, photographs 1957-2010 [34]