Curator: Samuel Aranda

Objective ►BCN. We portray the city is a documentary photography project aimed at creating an “urban memory” of our days, a most necessary enterprise. The participants in this first edition – some two hundred of them – are people of very different ages, backgrounds, tastes and photographic and aesthetic talents. The challenge was simple: to narrate small, everyday stories in order to build up a large overall story. A kind of civic history in different chapters.
 

The two hundred people registered for the project increased their knowledge of laboratory practice at a workshop given by Juan Manuel Castro Prieto; they learned how to use the social networks to the full and increase their visibility in the global age at the hand of Lindsay Mackenzie; they mused over ways of telling a story in images, looking at dozens of documentary projects with Txema Salvans and Toni Amengual; and they discovered how to put words to photographs at a writing workshop given by Inés Martínez Ribas. They also enjoyed and took inspiration from master classes by Navia, Abbas, Cristina García Rodero, Don McCullin, and David Airob and Joan Guerrero. Finally, over the five months that the project lasted – from February to June 2014 – the participants were guided by a team of tutors formed by Emilio Morenatti, Fernando Moleres, Walter Astrada, Carmen Secanella, Moises Saman and myself. During this time, we went all around the city, week after week, some in groups, others alone, submerging ourselves in everyday life in the neighbourhoods, streets and squares until we discovered the stories that the participants wanted to narrate. Once the guidelines had been established, we provided them with a series of tools to enable them to infuse the stories they told with substance.

The resulting process was an orderly chaos of ideas, a guided improvisation aimed at enriching the project with the creative spontaneity that any incipient initiative requires. The final result is a range of varied productions, created in very different photographic styles. Some reports are based on the purest, most classical black-and-white photojournalism; others make the leap to colour and adopt more modern styles. Whatever the style, though, the project is imbued with a narrative solidity that irrefutably gives it body, colour.

Street music, horses in La Mina neighbourhood, the victims of evictions, the city’s markets, the tiny Colònia Castells housing area, art residencies, city allotments, churrería fritter makers, the “third youth”, bird fanciers, striking workers, industrial chimneys, “touristification”, the architectural skin of the great city, firefighters, the circus made art, the economic crisis, the port, authorised and forbidden graffiti, the sharing economy… These are just some of the many “voices” in this plural portrait of Barcelona. This is the legacy that the city leaves to those who, in a few decades, ask what Barcelona was like in 2014.