Opening: Wednesday 11 February, at 7 pm

Jordi Socías. Found Photographs takes visitors on a journey through forty years of images. They were taken by a photographer who has spent his life reporting on events but, almost despite himself, has also seen his work presented at art galleries and exhibition centres around the world. As Socías himself puts it, this photographer just shows us what he finds before his own eyes. Hence the title of an exhibition that is strongly reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s “I do not look, I find”. Socías shows us the images he has found, and his gaze, refined by years of professional practice, reveals to us what might not be obvious at first sight, but which is there nevertheless.

The photographs of Jordi Socías (Barcelona, 1945) have filled newspapers and magazines since that day in 1972 when he made cameras the tools of his trade and, whilst never ceasing to learn himself, he began to teach people who viewed his works about the art of looking. His first master was the cinema. Through Godard and other Nouvelle Vague directors, he became immersed in the world of the image. Later, he discovered photography, thanks to the great practitioners, from Cartier-Bresson to William Klein and from Man Ray to Richard Avedon, who showed him that the image has a language and that it is necessary to be able to read a photograph.

Socías himself is a teacher today, and in this exhibition he shows us a selection of the photographs that he has taken over nearly forty years: portraits, images that illustrate the recent history of a country, and many more that have appeared before his eyes at one time or another over the course of his career. These are “found” images that teach us to see beyond the most evident aspects of reality. This is not a retrospective exhibition, but it does feature excellent examples of the huge range of different images that Jordi Socías has found (or that, perhaps, have found him) over the years. This selection all includes several fascinating recent works in which two apparently unrelated photographs are combined to suggest surprising new visual interpretations.