Tusquets de Cabirol in KBr Mapfre, the communicating forms

Nearly 5,000 negatives and a thousand positive copies make up the legacy of Barcelona-born Joaquín Tusquets de Cabirol, an amateur photographer who remained very active between the 1940s and 1960s and whose images, with an evident formalist imprint, bring us closer to daily life in the post-war period and in Catalonia.

It was just two decades ago, in 2004, when most of his negatives were discovered by chance in Mallorca and only in 2020 were all of these works attributed to his authorship; The interest in this author, therefore, has been very recent, but the breadth and quality of his production explain that Tusquets is now joining the exhibition program that KBr Fundación Mapfre focuses on Catalan and private photographic archives.

He photographed both the cities and the rural areas as well as the coast, focusing on the daily life of that difficult period – situations, spaces, gestures – and not on the great events. His images have a lot of record of this time, but, as we advance, they go beyond the document: through the choice of frames and his investigation into the capture of light, it is evident that Tusquets, who died in 1979, was aware that his aesthetic decisions would have a bearing on the meaning of his photos and not only on their appearance.

We say that he was an amateur because photography was not his professional dedication – he was a chemical expert and half-owner of a factory – but we do know that he gave almost all his free time to the camera, that he used a Rolleifex and that he photographed methodically, paying attention to all the phases of the process: the moments before shooting and those after developing and printing. He was in charge of those tasks himself.

He was a member of the Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya at a time when associations of this type were experiencing a fruitful period and competitions, exchanges and excursions for photography were held; Ultimately, doing so without depending financially on his work allowed him to create with a certain formal freedom. He made use, and it is easy to guess that consciously, of the cinematic general shot and the detail shot, closer to abstraction.

Today his legacy is managed by the Photographic Social Vision Foundation, which has collaborated with the Mapfre Foundation in the organization of this exhibition, structured in four chapters that are not chronological, but rather thematic and formal. The first takes us to the coast, especially the port of Barcelona, ​​widely explored by many amateur authors in Catalonia; Unlike some of his contemporaries, Tusquets did not look for its picturesque side, but rather for its architecture and its work and social dimension: those who came there for work or leisure passed through his lens and with them he tested frames and games of gaze.

As a constant background to their activities, the horizon always remains, which seems to project and shelter their days at the same time.

As for its cities, Barcelona was by far the most photographed, although when I traveled I did not forget its Rollei and he also took images in Paris or Venice, on his long walks as an unexpected flâneur. Also there, his love for ordinary people and for settings that are not especially monumental tells us about a taste for simplicity and improvisation inevitably linked to modern photography and the French photography of that time (Brassaï).

The fruits of your excursions with your family or with the Catalan photography group also have their own section. It was on these journeys that he focused primarily on nature, but also on the urban transits towards it: peripheries that seemed anodyne, but in which Tusquets knew how to find the spirit of his time and echoes of Italian neorealist cinema.

The last chapter of the tour collects his most daring images in formal terms, and at the same time refined, whether he took them in the city, in the countryside or in front of the sea: surfaces, objects and architectural fragments decontextualized and chosen solely for the suggestiveness of their lines, their textures or volumes. They do not describe: they evoke with eloquence.

«Joaquín Tusquets from Cabirol. The eloquent way

KBr MAPFRE FOUNDATION

Avenida del Litoral, 30

Barcelona

From June 18 to September 6, 2026