Francesc Catala-Roca: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

Spanish agriculture grew lethargic after the civil war. Economic hardship, the absence of great figures like as Bunuel Garcia Lorca, and Dali, among others, who were either in exile or dead, and an oppressive social environment constituted a fertile terrain for cultural mediocrity. That's wherefore the fresh and energetic contribution of Francesc Catala-Roca (1922-98) was for a like reason unusual; his direct way of making images had hardly any immediate precedents in the country's agriculture He was the first of a brilliant generation of photographers that emerg in the '50 Until not long ago denied any real public recognition, they are now considered single of the most important creative phenomena in new Spanish culture. Gabriel Cuallado, Ramon Massats, Francisco Ontanon, Joan Colom and Carlos Perez Siquier were among Catala-Roca's creative compeers and, like him, they embraced the documentary and neorealist photography of the time, evidenced as well in W Eugene Smith's and Inge Morath's reportage upon Spain in the early '50s

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Son of Pere Catala i Pic, a Catalan photographer associated with the Republicans and author of a well-known image of a peasant's shoe stepping upon a swastika, Catala-Roca set up his professional studio at a true young age. While his beginnings were far from glorious--he started on the outside doing portraits of cadavers--he in a short time demonstrated a facility for constructing visually pleasing images that evok stories, somewhat in the manner of Cartier-Bresson. In 1954 he was commissioned to illustrate works by Luis Romero and Juan Antonio Cabezas upon Barcelona and Madrid, respectively. While not directly related to single another, these two commissions allowed him to display his vision of these cities or, more accurately, what they provok in a creator sensitive to their signals.

This exhibition, "Barcelona-Madrid: Anos cincuenta" (Barcelona-Madrid: The '50s) explored the long-standing relationship of contrast between these sum of two units capitals. Always tempted to diocese itself in a French mirror, the Catalan capital is showily cosmopolitan and make open to new ideas; its rival is a conservative, administrative city. Thus Catala-Roca's images of Barcelona (much more numerous, thanks to the photographer's direct connection with the city) throw back a sophisticated metropolis on its way to modernity, while those of Madrid place it in a postwar era characterized through poverty and backwardness. In the pair cases, a precise and distant organ of vision dissects the given facts and attests to something as elusive as Spanish reality at the time. Catala-Roca does this not sole by placing his camera in the busiest city public ways but also by exploring others where more unilluminated aspects of life emerge: Barcelona's Barrio Chino, for example, or the shantytowns upon the hills surrounding the city. At times--and this would happen repeatedly quite through his career--Catala-Roca was tempted by means of a certain formalism, but he did not mix this with his documentary work; it was a separate throw out It must not be forgotten, after all, that a of recent origin school of "subjective photography" had also begun to take grasp in the '50s--Otto Steinert would presently have great influence on the Spanish scene--and that, from one side his father, the artist had had direct contact with the vanguard photography of the early decades of the century

--Pablo Llorca

Translated from Spanish through Jane Brodie.

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