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four years ago I finished the book Barcelona. Prestigious photographers had documented the city but the result that remained showed, in most cases, a post-war city, poor and sad. So I set out to find less dramatic images of Barcelona, but not for that reason frivolous and of lesser quality or interest. The final result was a book that compiles works by great photographers, from Cartier-Bresson, to Avedon, Newton, Catala-Roca or Gerda Taro. A carefully crafted edition of great quality, with the seal of La Fábrica, and which in recent years, we could say, has become the "coffee table book" of the city.
With Barcelona Fotos Prohibidas I sought to offer another perspective or, rather, the opposite perspective, or as Rodrigo Fresán says in the prologue, the B-side of the city. When I was living in New York in the nineties, the city had just emerged from a very tough period of drugs, sex, and all kinds of crime. Some neighborhoods were very dangerous. With Mayor Giuliani, all that changed and NYC gradually became a safe city. But the idea that the underworld and the wildest dealings had reigned in the city imbued the atmosphere with a much more attractive patina than if it had always been an exemplary city. Now, writing this, I also think of Marseille, Naples, Odessa, New Orleans…and of course, Barcelona. Would we like our city to only be warm, Gaudian, touristy, gastronomic, and design-oriented? Not me. Like New York, Barcelona is also dark, secret, incorrect, rowdy, fun, mysterious, bad and good, safe and a little dangerous. Here is the cocktail, always with a few drops of angostura, lest it be too sweet.
The original idea for this book emerged in November 2016 with the aim of compiling images that had been censored at the time. The search was not easy at all, precisely because they were forbidden photos, they couldn't be found. They were not cataloged. Hence, I slowly broadened the scope, and in this way, photographs emerged that did not strictly fit the adjective 'forbidden,' but which nevertheless seemed like precious finds to me. Thus, the process itself brought unexpected nuances. It was no longer just about unpublished photos; it was about politically incorrect, irreverent, stolen, furtive images, which in some cases violate a certain intimacy and turn us into voyeurs, into invisible guests of clandestine dens, secret scenes, and forbidden quarters.
Especially fascinating are the stories surrounding some of the photos included in this volume; Txema Salvans used a technique in his renowned images of roadside prostitution. He disguised himself in a yellow surveyor's jumpsuit to plant his tripod wherever he was most interested, right in the best frame, with the excuse of checking certain cartographic measurements.
Joan Colom shot without looking, with great skill, while Lluís Artús does the exact opposite, seducing the most marginalized characters to pose for him, illuminating them and achieving an impressive result.
David Armengou and Marcela Miret, without being photojournalists and without knowing exactly what was happening, found themselves with the dilemma of whether or not to go to Las Ramblas, just seconds after the terrorist attack, with the great risk that this entailed. What their cameras captured there went around the world.
Meanwhile, the prestigious photographer Samuel Aranda covered the attack for the New York Times, traveling from San Sebastián to Barcelona at full speed and from there to Ripoll, to capture one of the most moving images in this book, the moment when the terrorists' relatives discover the involvement of their loved ones in the attacks on Las Ramblas and Cambrils.
Probably Manel Armengol's is the best known. The photograph that had to travel outside the country so that Europe would know what was happening here in 1976. Years later, 1-O brought a certain déjà vu that has also been represented in the book.
But it's not all harsh images; there's also tenderness, happiness, beauty, oddities, everyday life, and love. All of this is divided into three major chapters, with dozens of images from nearly 40 photographers.
An unprecedented journey through Barcelona's wildest side.
Featured images:
Photographs of the cover and some interior pages of the book "Barcelona Fotos Prohibidas". The photographs in order of appearance are © by Roberto Ramos, Julián Martín Cuesta, Samuel Aranda, Joan Colom, and Samuel Navarrete.