Located above Avenida Diagonal tucked away on a quite street- The Foto Colectania Foundation sits in a nondescript building and hides one of the best kept secrets documenting Barcelona’s past. Their latest exhibit which opens on Wednesday (September 19) presents one the city’s lesser known street photographers in a show simply titled “Barcelona 1957. Leopoldo Pomés“. The Foto Colectania recovers the photographic journey through the city of Barcelona when publisher Carlos Barral commissioned a young Pomés in 1957 to document city life through his own eyes.
Far from portraying Barcelona as a “showcase” city, Pomés guides you on a tour through the very essence of Barcelona in the late fifties, offering up his own view rather than a generic look at the city as a whole. Documenting life in neighborhoods such as the Raval and the Eixample his camera lens also captured the more marginalized barrios of Barcelona like the now infamous Barceloneta, and the areas of the Verdum and the Encants, which at the time were located outside the city limits. However, despite its quality and intensity, for some reason theses images , most of which have never been seen have not surfaced until now.
Curated by Pepe Font de Mora, director of Foto Colectania the exhibit which runs from September 19 to January 26, 2013 will feature the 80 photographs, many of them vintage prints, that composed the original project.
The collection will also be compiled in a photo-book co-edited by Colectania in collaboration with La Fábrica, including texts by Juan Manuel Bonet, Leopoldo Pomés and Eduardo Mendoza and will be on sale at the Foundation.
Fundació FOTO COLECTANIA
Julián Romea, 6, D2 08006 Barcelona, Tel. +34 93 217 16 26, E-mail: colectania@colectania.es
