It still smells of ink, just out of print, which could strictly be described as the final statement by Ada Colau’s defense attorney now that the mayoress’s second term is coming to an end and the election trial is coming to an end. could be paraphrased here to Atticus Finchthe name that Harper Lee chose for the lawyer in her most famous novel, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, and that Gregory Peck played with such solvency —“I will start by saying that this case should not have been brought before a court & rdquor;–, but for months the ongoing transformation in the city has been debated, sometimes in very dirty ways, so whether Finch likes it or not, there is a trial because there is no consensus. What you will be able to read below is, therefore, a simply descriptive summary of what one of the parties, that of the defendant’s defense, says in book format. It is called ‘Survey Barcelona’ and, in essence, they are 600 photographs that, if the context is unknown, beautifully portray a city in which one would like to live.
This type of visual albums with the municipal seal has a long tradition in Barcelona, perhaps something logical if one remembers the insistence of this city on shedding its skin. It refers to this, without mincing words, always provocative, Valentín Roma, artistic director of La Virreina Center de l’Imatge and author of the text that introduces the selection of images. “Photography has not been alien to these discursive metamorphoses. We could even say that it was one of his most effective tools for the glorification of the past, for the propaganda underpinning and for the canonization of government stories& rdquor ;. Rome trusts that ‘Survey Barcelona’ has not fallen into these vices, but that is something that ultimately the readers must decide.
Rome reviews in its introduction some background, especially the case of those exhibitions and books published after the Olympic Games, when, according to Rome, “a stage of dissociation began between the official narratives about the city and the collective uses that were developed& rdquor ;. There was even what used to be called counterprogramming on television. When in 1995 Josep Antoni Acebillo and Pep Subirós showed the transformation of Barcelona at the Maremàgnum, with its ring of Glòries, the roundabouts, the Moll de la Fusta and several etceteras, a year later an exhibition by the Fundació Tàpies premiered photographer Craigie Horsfield, titled ‘The City of the People’, with a plot thesis that was diametrically contrary to that of the first exhibition.
What Rome comes to explain, in essence, is that through the photographs in which Barcelona is the main protagonist, its history could be known, for example, how it gradually assimilated with the turn of the century “a neoliberal and technocratic conception of the city& rdquor ;, a process that reached its zenith when people began to talk about this metropolis in terms of a brand.
‘Survey Barcelona’ is, in this sense, a new chapter in that photographic trajectory, but, yes, quite groundbreaking.
Behind the cameras have been 10 photographers coordinated by one of the union, Adrià Goula, who explains what is the lowest common denominator of the 600 portraits. Each author has been entrusted with a look. Are they parksthe uses that people give to the transformed spaces, the nocturnal postcardsthe houses, the vegetation, the wildlife (in the good sense of the expression), the architecture (no monumentalities for ‘épater’, as in the past), the interiors (it is inevitable to mention here how magnetic a visit to the García Márquez Library), the transformation of the streets and, in what perhaps requires a full stop, the bird’s eye viewlike the one in the photo gallery that heads this bibliographical review.
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Rome tells in the book that when Parisians were able to climb the Eiffel Tower for the first time In 1889, they finally understood the magnificence of the city in which they had been lucky to live. That, visually and sentimentally, was a new perspective on Paris.
Aerial photography, unless it is furtive, that is, with unauthorized drones, usually shows only what the person who allows that flight wants. It is arbitrary. That does not mean, however, that the views from the sky offered by ‘Survey Barcelona’ are really interesting. 30 years ago I boasted acebillo of the elevated viaduct for Glòries vehiclesalso known as the drum, an infrastructure at the service of traffic, and the current view of that place hardly shows scars from that not so distant past in time.