Throughout his career, Manolo Laguillo (Madrid, 1953) has been a leading figure in the documentation of the urban environment in Spain over the last four decades. His earliest works date from the late 1970s, when he began to take photographs of the outskirts of Barcelona and the city’s old quarter. Later on, by now in the second half of the eighties and during the nineties, his images recorded the process of metropolitan transformation prior to and after the 1992 Olympic Games.

Despite his close links with our city, not only in the field of photographic production but also through his work as an academic teacher and on the theory of the medium, Laguillo undertook numerous projects that explore places as disparate as Mexico, New York, Berlin, Porto and Madrid, among others.

Even though his works tend to be in keeping with the descriptive style of the new topographics—an international photographic trend that emerged in the mid-seventies—Laguillo adds to the technical precision of his documents a kind of record that deliberately retains substantial features of the experience of the flâneur, a way of portraying the urban landscape at ground level, as if his wanderings were also being depicted.

This exhibition features a total of 205 photographs arranged into 27 series—ten of them never shown in public before—that extend from 1983, with Laguillo’s group of works on the flooding of Bilbao, to 2020, in his photo reportages on the nuclear power station in Zorita (Guadalajara) and on the city of Trieste.

To an extent, Projects (1983-2020) is a continuation of the sequence of exhibitions that began in 2007 with the
first survey of Laguillo’s career, mounted by the MACBA and centred around his series on Barcelona between 1978 and 1997, followed by his retrospective entitled Reason and City at the Museo ICO in Madrid in 2013. Thereafter, he embarked on a change in direction, a period, as he describes it, of «relearning the craft and settling my accounts» with his earlier projects.

Notable among the series on display are Japan 2014, Beirut 2017, Chicago 2019, The Strait of Gibraltar 2018-2019, and above all The Provinces 2014-2015, a collection of 64 diptychs on eight cities in the Iberian Peninsula, made with the support of the Museo Universidad de Navarra, as well as April 2020. Barcelona, produced during the lockdown and being shown for the first time at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge.

The book Pseudopanorama, edited by Moritz Küng, is being published to coincide with Manolo Laguillo. Projects (1983-2020).