Colita

Isabel Steva Hernández, better known as Colita, is a Barcelona citizen born in the heart of the city in 1940.  She is one of the main photographers of whom the journalist Joan de Sagarra baptised as the Gauche Divine, a whole group of personalities from the Catalan capital - architects, novel writers, philosophers, poets, photographers, publishers, people from the cinema, models, designers or interior designers, who in the late period of the Franco years would make a display of disrespect against the customs and the traditional ways of life and that would become cultural references.

Her speciality is to do portraits in black and white. She understands photography as a document, a deposit of the memory.  In 1971 she exhibited her portraits of the Gauche Divine in the Galeria Aixelà. It was the shortest exhibition of her life, closed the following day by the police.  A militant feminist, in her words, photography has always been what has made her live.

Carmen Amaya and los Tarantos, Colita, 1963

Other works of the artist in the online catalogue: Antonio Gades, rehearsal at the Academia de Juan de Dios and V. Escudero and A. Gades in Barcelona