Free guided tours every Tuesday at 5 pm.
 

The photographs featured in this exhibition were found some years ago in the Polish reporter’s private archive. They date back to the period from 1989-1991, when he was travelling the republics of what was still the Soviet Union. Ryszard Kapuściński had initially planned to organise an exhibition of photographs taken from those travels himself: he personally selected the prints and pictures, and then kept the negatives in brown envelopes in his archive, where they would remain for almost a decade.

The first Decline of the Empire exhibition opened on 17 December 2010 in the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and displayed 50 of the hundreds of 100 x 70 centimetre-format photographs that had been taken in the former USSR. The images shown were selected by Izabela Wojciechowska (1954-2010), one of Poland’s foremost graphic editors and editor-in-chief of the Photography Department of the Polish Press Agency (the PAP, or Polska Agencja Prasowa). She was the person responsible for custody and management of Ryszard Kapuściński’s photographic legacy, and in the initial selection included photographs from the travels made by Kapuściński in 1979, following forty years’ absence from his native Pińsk. Thanks to this addition, the photographic journey through these regions acquires a personal dimension.

The Ryszard Kapuściński photographic archive consists of almost 10,000 images, and possibly constitutes just a small part of his body of photographic work: that which has been salvaged. Although this archive is predominated by snapshots of Africa, a continent that has been the focus of previous exhibitions, the uniqueness of The Decline of the Empire lies in its landscapes and subjects: the only geographical boundary the artist crossed in the travels depicted in this exhibition was that of the neighbouring empire. A world seemingly much closer, but nonetheless no less strange.

After Warsaw the exhibition visited Lublin and Wrocław, though a smaller-scale version travelled almost the length and breadth of Poland. The display being presented in Barcelona and which was previously seen in Madrid is the second reduced version, comprising 36 of the 50 photographs that made up the original exhibition presented in Warsaw. The images bear witness to both the talent of the photojournalist as well as the artistic quality of his work, with images of landscapes containing houses and cemeteries, complemented by portraits of human faces. Among them may be found photographs dedicated to the historic event that was the failed August coup d’état (Moscow, 1991), as well as several snapshots of the author’s long journey through the Russian Empire.