Barcelona,
Few corners of the West knew in the thirty -lasting periods somewhat durable, either Catalonia or Barcelona. It was a convulsed time in the social and political, and professional in the professional, for that same reason, for the photojournalists, whose works populated newspapers and magazines, as a testimony and in turn food of a mass society interested in knowing everything.
In the Catalan context, one of the most prominent was the ilerdense Joan Andreu Puig Farran (1904-1982), and his production dated precisely in the thirty Gonzàlez and Toni Monné. His snapshots of those years – who were thousands – give an account of these tensions; At first, Carlos Pérez de Rozas Masdeu was carried out with his partner, and it was at that stage alone when several Catalan media flooded: Humanitat and Last minutelinked to ERC; The Catholic and Catalan weekly Esplai And then the newspaper The avant -garde.
Throughout those thirty years we can also appreciate how their work procedures advanced to the sound: from a plaque to a comfortable Leica, from the photo fixed to others very dynamic, attached therers to the agitated news of this moment. Over the years, that vast work corpus ended up reduced to a personal archive that, in the study of his career, has been completed with the analysis of the press of that time. The choice of this decade as a framework of the sample is not only due to its chronological interest: Puig Farran, very active during the civil war in Aragon and Mallorca, was exiled in France in 1939, went through various concentration camps of the neighboring and Spanish country, and from now created the CYP postcards.
The exhibition opens by reviewing the work of this author in Barcelona since the end of the twenties, when he settled there, to the outbreak of the war. He documented the many contrasts that the city, like other greats, knew: among the bourgeois customs, those of the theaters professionals, those of the fishermen of the Barceloneta … responding to those wishes of the public to meet him everything, his camera shot in multiple directions: to the Hindu students who visited the Palau de la Generalitat, the wait for Pope Pi New department stores, attention to the numbers awarded in the Christmas Lottery …
A specific chapter is granted in exposure to sport: it was in 1929 when the first football league was played in our country. In addition to this discipline, boxing and cycling would since then win prominence thanks to amateurism, without special support of government policies: in fact, its practice was criticized, by political groups of different tendencies, for degrading public morality and blurring class borders. In parallel, photography contributed to converting certain athletes (those of FC Barcelona, Marià Cañardo, Josep Gironès) into stars, so much that Puig Farran was one of the most requested figures to cover competitions.
Another section of the sample includes its visions of the events of October 6, 1934. That day, Companys, then president of the Generalitat, proclaimed the Catalan state in protest of the entrance of the CEDA into the government, Republican and conservative, of Alejandro Larroux, and from sovereign positions linked to the moderate left. Around that date, Puig Farran photographed former president Azaña, Companys, to citizens favorable to the Generalitat and the military deployed to end the rebellion.
The political pulse prior to the civil war, the rallies and demonstrations, passed in front of their chamber to the same extent as theoretically banal facts of everyday life. When the radio had not yet widespread in homes and cinema began to capture both real stories and fictions, the photojournalists allowed the press of the press reader the opportunity to approach the diversity of life that was close to them. In most Puig’s photos, the anguish that will come are not yet, we will see walkers looking at electoral propaganda, others queuing to vote between 1933 and 1936 …
The last chapter of the tour is dedicated, as will be predictable for the visitor, to the civil war. In its beginnings, the photographer’s activity increased to meet the needs of the press, in the case of the near Puig Farran, linked to leftist parties and unions. As we said, he was in the front of Aragon or in the attempt of conquest of Mallorca by the Generalitat. Even at that time, in his work the instants contradictory fit: Mutilated militiamen in Barcelona hospitals and bathers on the beaches of the same city.
In the context of battle, their images seem to serve an epic and faith desire in victory among the supporters of the Republic. They reached great diffusion and, precisely because of that, they hindered the continuity of their career after the contest, along with their exile in France: he was condemned to the death penalty, but was switched on, being nevertheless refined. In any case, in those years counted at the service of reporterism, he could attest to the paradoxes of any problematic time, of the daily life of many who could sign, such as Kafka, Today Germany has declared war on Russia. In the afternoon I went to swim.
“Joan Andreu Puig Farran: the convulsa decade (1929-1939)”
KBR Mapfre Foundation
Avenida Litoral, 30
Barcelona
From June 12 to August 31, 2025
