Català-Roca in America: craftsmanship and color

Madrid,

Three years ago, various exhibitions commemorated the centenary of the birth in Valls (Tarragona) of Francesc Català-Roca, who was a founding figure of Spanish documentary photography and was part of a family that was also a founding figure: his father is Pere Català i Pic, who is considered one of the introducers of this discipline in Catalonia, especially in its avant-garde aspect.

Inheriting this interest in images, the artist would open his own studio in 1947, first carrying out editorial commissions for publications such as Destiny, Illustrated Gazette either The Vanguard; study works for books, in collaboration with authors such as Sert, Eduardo Chillida or Joan Miró (some of these volumes were dedicated to the history of Catalan art; and he also produced a documentary about the latter painter) and, progressively, also reports on the social reality of Spain in the middle of the last century, urban and rural, work or beach.

We could frame his style, due to these concerns, in a photographic neorealism that opted for adopting almost unprecedented points of view, highlighting the contrasts between lights and shadows and always paying attention, as is characteristic of that movement, to human stories, without subtracting power. to the anecdote to find in it more than that, meaning. In fact, in addition to his evident technical good work and his virtuoso low angle shots, he added his special talent for coming into contact, and trust, with those he portrayed, witnesses like him of the harshness of the post-war years and the more benign years of developmentalism; In the Spanish case, because his career took him outside our borders.

Until next April, the Museum of America in Madrid hosts the exhibition “The eloquence of the image. Català-Roca in America”, which includes a selection of more than two hundred images among the nearly 7,000 that the photographer took on that continent in the seventies and, in most cases, in color: his desire to reflect The reality of his time and his environment went beyond formal and aesthetic considerations and it would be precisely in New York where he began to use it, aware that this was the future of photography, as had been its (pictorial) past. He then stated: Until now we have experienced an anomalous situation: we have seen the world in black and white. We are now ending the 20th century, the only achromatic period in human history; Previously all iconography was polychrome. Black and white are two colors that are still familiar to us today, but that will disappear in the future, they are two false colors, they do not exist..

As recalled in his 2022 retrospective at Sala El Águila, the architecture of New York itself, which he referred to as fascinating and fascinatingit seems that it impressed him a lot: skyscrapers allowed him to delve deeper into his games of shapes, colors and effects of light and shadow, now serving the visual power of the structural elements, textures, materials and construction details of the buildings. .

The eloquence of the image. Català-Rock in America. Museum of America

The works that await us in the capital come from Català-Roca’s personal archive, which is preserved in the National Archive of Catalonia, and under the curatorship of Lia Colombino they are exhibited sharing spaces with nearly forty pieces from the collections of the Museum of America with which the popular cultures and traditional ways of life represented in the snapshots are related. They correspond to successive trips: the earliest works were carried out in Mexico in 1973 and the last in Ecuador, in 1979; All of them were commissioned by the Blume publishing house, focused on art, photography and culture books, and were intended to illustrate catalogs of American popular art.

This firm was looking for images that captured the methods of production of artisanal objects, but guided by his own instinct, the author went further in order to portray other customs and living conditions linked to traditional ways of survival that half a century ago were already in the process. of disappearance. We will contemplate ritual and market scenes, portraits of diverse people and landscapes, in addition to those artisans in action, along with forty pieces in different formats made in those same geographies at different historical moments: ceramics (jars, vessels, plates), basketry ( bag, comb, baskets and trays), textiles (jackets, skirts or traditional blouses or huipils), decorations (head and waist headdresses, bracelets, masks), work tools (reins, stirrups, spurs) and objects associated with rituals (figures, votive offerings, plates and small altars).

We will also be able to see the cameras used by Català-Roca and models, engraving plates, publishing contracts and the Blume catalogs themselves. The capture of everyday life, together with that first use of color, were for the Tarragona native a tool to find the identity of social groups that still related to their environment in their own and very close way. Many of the artisanal products they use contrast with the then incipient use of plastics and industrial fabrics that suggested fashions to come, wide-ranging changes. It must be remembered that, in this decade of the seventies, many of the countries that the photographer visited suffered from dictatorships and violent conflicts: Catalan does not reflect them directly, but sometimes it does show their effects in a subtle way, in the form of work hard and precarious.