Francesc Català-Roca
The clarity of the gaze
It is well worth popping over to Madrid from 2 June to 18 September, to take in the exhibition at El Águila in which PHotoESPAÑA pays tribute to the photographer Francesc Català-Roca (Valls, Tarragona, 1922 – Barcelona, 1998) on the centenary of his birth. One of the great names of Spanish post-war documentary humanist photography, he also left behind some of the most beautiful photographs of Mallorca, and was the father of the generation that reformed the Spanish photographic language.
text César Mateu Moyà
photography Francesc Català-Roca
Thanks to his own father, Pere Català i Pic, who was also a photographer, as a young child Francesc learned “to look” through negatives, cameras, plates and tripods. Although his photographs were successful from the moment he began exhibiting them, when he was 31, he thought of himself as “a professional of the photography that tries to capture everyday realtiy, more of a documentalist than an artist”. As a result of his great technical capability and natural talent for connecting with the people he portrayed, Català-Roca’s images are tremendously beautiful, and go way beyond giving us a black-and-white picture of everyday life in Spain.
“To take somebody’s photograph is to fix a moment in their life”, asserted the man who took over 200,000 photographs in his lifetime. Català-Roca’s life work is an exciting journey through time on which he photographed the Spanish countryside, cities, traditions or bullfights, and portrayed figures like Salvador Dalí or his intimate friend, Joan Miró. “For me, photography is a language through which the photographer speaks, and the onlooker knows how to listen and understand”, he said. His facet as a portrait photographer shows us both the poverty of marginalised neighbourhoods, with pictures of peddlers, messenger boys, shoe shiners or junk dealers, and the elegance of the theatre-going bourgeoisie.
In short, Català-Roca taught us to [...]
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