During much of its modern and contemporary period, at least, Barcelona’s urban history seems to fall within a recurring triangle. At one vertex is territorial evolution based on the big event: the 1888 Universal Exposition, the 1929 International Exposition, the 1992 Olympic Games and the 2004 Forum of Cultures. At the next, the priorities assigned by each corresponding ideology to the uses of public space —historicism versus homogeneity, positivist urbanism versus hygienist urbanism, social democracy versus neoliberalism, outsourcing versus the right to housing, and so on. The final of the three vertices represents ways of paying attention to, or ignoring, the role of the popular classes in the economic and political landscape of the city.

Photography has not been indifferent to these discursive metamorphoses. We might even say it has been one of the most effective tools for glorifying the past, underpinning propaganda and canonizing government narratives. It remains to be seen whether our photographic culture can be recast according to other parameters, and whether it will truly contribute elements that accompany and consolidate metropolitan memory from differing perspectives.

This text looks at a specific stage in the visual narration of Barcelona, encompassing the restoration of democracy in 1979, the Olympic run-up of the mid-1980s, and the effects of financial capitalism between 2008 and 2011. However, two major previous episodes are worth noting: one which extends from the Cerdà Plan to the Civil War —that is, from 1860 to 1936—and another from the fifties to the end of Franco’s dictatorship. There is a fourth moment, pending detailed critical examination, that investigates the imaginaries of the conservative political cycle, from 2011 to 2015, as well as the projects of photographic documentation undertaken by Barcelona City Council as of 2018.

From the restoration of democracy in municipal government (1979) to the designation of Barcelona as host of the 1992 Olympic Games, announced in 1986, the city witnessed a “reconstruction”¹ that coincided with the victory of social democracy throughout the eighties.

This process of far-reaching transformations saw the consolidation, in the field of photography, of documentary practices of a very different kind that dominated the scene in that decade.

One of the most outstanding experiences was that of the Barcelona International Photography Centre (Cifb), which, between 1978 and 1983, prompted new approaches in the representation of the social landscape.² Headed by Albert Guspi, the Cifb promoted initiatives like the project in 1980 about proletarian life in Barcelona neighbourhoods, bringing together the work of young documentary photographers.³ Another notable proposal was the reportage by Jesús Atienza, Pep Cunties and Eduardo Subías about the Santa Creu Mental Institute, in 1979, presented with a soundtrack composed by pianist and photographer Mariano Zuzunaga.

In addition to the Cifb, various local photographers emerged to challenge the structural metamorphosis of the urban territory. This was case, for example, of Manolo Laguillo’s coverage of the architecture projects of Eduard Bru, Josep Llinàs and Josep Lluís Mateo, narrating the city’s state of transition with a dry, rigorous, unsentimental style that side-stepped any lionizing prosopopoeia. Then there was Humberto Rivas, known for his portraits, who recovered the interest in terrain vague and edgelands. And Marta Povo, whose series on artisan trades (1979-1983) catalogued a succession of professions on the verge of disappearance. And Jordi Sarrà, who, in Barcelona East Coast, compiled forms of spontaneous architecture and self-building on the southern Llobregat seafront. And, finally, Joan Fontcuberta, who, between 1981 and 1984, photographed night-time landscapes of the metropolitan area that recounted its industrial past.

A few years later, in 1986, there was a second wave of documentary photography of Barcelona when work started on the big remodelling operations for the 1992 Olympic Games, centred on Montjuïc, the Raval, the Vila Olímpica and various parts of Diagonal and Vall d’Hebron. This gave rise to photographic poetics with radically opposed paradigms to those of previous works. This was the case of Barcelona, ciutat imaginada,⁴ a popular proposal in which Manel Esclusa introduced aestheticist values and phantasmagorical suggestions into the representation of new architectures. Jordi Bernadó’s images of the wastelands of Poblenou in around 1990 were also significant, suggesting drifts through generic places devoid of specificity. Finally, also worthy of mention is Poblenou (1987-1989), by Martí Llorens, a series of photographs taken with a large-format pinhole camera that documents the widespread demolition of old buildings and the neighbourhood’s manufacturing origins.⁵

But the main diagnosis of pre-Olympic urbanism was presented in 1990 by Quaderns, the magazine of the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (Coac), conceived and coordinated by the architects Josep Lluís Mateo and Manel Gausa, and photographer Jordi Bernadó.

Presented as the first of three issues to be published consecutively,⁶ this survey followed the model of the photographic mission of the Datar (Délegation à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’Action Régionale), a vast documentary project commissioned by the French Government between 1984 and 1988, giving rise to versions at different scales in numerous European countries.

The aim of the proposal was to establish a possible reading of the territory by searching for variables that differed from those of administrative boundaries, since an investigation of the configuration of the city revealed urban typologies and communication networks historically derived from its geography. The thesis was bold and at once prescient, since the leap in scale of Barcelona after 1992 expressed itself by means of these same territorial spillovers.

In accordance with this plan, the survey outlined seven working areas, organized according to typological and physical morphological criteria. Ana Muller photographed the foothills, Manolo Laguillo the strip of mountainside, Gilbert Fastenaekens the Besòs area, John Davies the Llobregat area, Gabriele Basilico took care of the coastline, Ferran Freixa of the Eixample, and Joan Fontcuberta did the same in the old town, Ciutat Vella.

The project certainly created new codes for the documentary photography of the time. First of all, it introduced methods in which photographic observation was not just a record of architecture, road layouts or landscape environments, but also helped to enhance urban analysis and understanding. Then it was also postulated as an alternative —a belligerent alternative, even— to the humanism of the fifties, whose images of Barcelona dominated the city’s visual narrative for decades, but then failed even to capture new social subjectivities or the experience of an unrecognizable metropolis in search of other syntaxes.

After the Olympic Games came a phase of dissociation between official narratives about the city and the collective uses developed in it. This was, in fact, the theme investigated by the series Sundays (1994-1997),⁷ by Xavier Ribas, that typified certain habits in peripheral areas, showing a flexible, unforeseen experience of the landscape that was quite foreign to normative parameterized urban planning, or Barcelona (1997)⁸ by Jean-Marc Bustamante, who, after photographing the run-down Collserola periphery in the late 1960s, represented the old town with stereotypical and rather insipid images.

In 1996, the Antoni Tàpies Foundation organized The City of the People, a project by Craigie Horsfield that might, today, be considered the last great exercise in questioning the consensual propaganda of the nineties.⁹ This exhibition was a response to the one held a year previously by Barcelona City Council in Maremàgnum, with the curatorial direction of Josep Acebillo and Pep Subirós, entitled Barcelona, the City and the People.

The idea underlying the exhibition was politically and visually to challenge the official clichés of post-Olympism and its iconographies of a homogeneous civil society with its sights set on the future. To do so, Horsfield took 50 black-and-white photographs, of enormous dimensions, that illustrated the diversity and the historical testimonies of the lower classes in Ciutat Meridiana, Vallbona and Torre Baró.

The proposal did, at times, lapse into excessive nostalgia; yet its author and the curators —Jean-François Chevrier and Manuel J. Borja-Villel, then director of the Foundation— must also be credited with blazing new methodological trails. One such, perhaps representing the biggest departure, was the proposal of a model of cooperative work, promoted by an institution that saw and pronounced itself as a space of dissidence, displacing local urban phenomena towards the field of art and confronting the dramatization of the characteristic image of the traditions of documentary photography.

As of 1997, the social democratic paradigm characterizing the eighties and nineties was progressively replaced by a neoliberal technocratic conception of the city. In other words, as Mari Paz Balibrea pointed out, in the course of those years Barcelona embarked on a journey that led it “from model to brand”.¹⁰

The Universal Forum of Cultures (2004) —intended to prolong what the Olympics had represented in 1992— was the catalyst of a new photographic imaginary. The generic urban space, devoid of specific data or even any kind of history, became the territory inhabited by a perfect, enterprising, creative middle class.¹¹

Simultaneously, at the turn of the century and with particular force between 2001 and 2004, the city produced a thunderous social response headed by anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements, as exemplified by three consecutive campaigns: one in June 2001 against the World Bank conference in Barcelona, cancelled due to the organizers’ fears; one in March 2002 against the European Union summit, and those of 2004 against the Forum of Cultures.¹²

In this context, in 1999 French photographer Patrick Faigenbaum and historian Joan Roca undertook a major project of documentation, Barcelona Seen from the Besòs, which analysed the changes at the mouth of the river Besòs prior to the pomp of Forum 2004. More than describing an area of the city or a community, the project, which continued until 2007, intended to represent an urban process from a peripheral perspective —that of the neighbourhoods on the northeast seafront— in order to construct, in Roca’s words, “a locally rooted but not localist vision”.¹³

Also important was the photographic documentation of industrial architectural heritage by Xavier Basiana and Jaume Orpinell with the title Barcelona, ciutat de fàbriques, in the form of an exhibition, Barcelona, City of Factories, at the Coac and a self-published book in 2000.¹⁴ In retrospect, this book turned out to be a prelude to the mobilizations headed by the Ribera del Besòs Forum, the Neighbourhood Association of Poblenou and the Historical Archive of Poblenou, which, against the backdrop of gentrification of the neighbourhood by the 22@ project, and with Can Ricart factory as its epicentre, presented a solid discrepancy with the post-Fordist economic model, and a critical evaluation of its social consequences.

In the same vein, though more tacit in tone, it is worth adding the issue that Quaderns magazine dedicated to the Forum in January 2004, under the direction of Iván Bercedo and Jorge Mestres, which contributed various photographic works, including Jordi Secall’s coverage of the changes in working-class housing in Poblenou.¹⁵

As of 2006, the socialist project that had been predominant in Barcelona since the restoration of democracy in 1979 began gradually to break down. The end of the first three-party coalition;¹⁶ the reform, not implemented by the Spanish Government, of the Statute of Autonomy in 2006; the approval by Barcelona City Council of the citizenship ordinance in 2005, stigmatizing certain vulnerable groups and implanting a regime of control in public space implemented partly by the police and partly by morality, and, above all, the withdrawal from politics of Pasqual Maragall, then president of the Generalitat de Catalunya, with its effects on regional and municipal government leadership, saw the city’s ruling bourgeoisie, legitimized by its charismatic harmony with the middle classes, leave a vacuum of ideological representation that became a power void after the crisis of financial capitalism.

At a different level, after the major mobilizations between the late nineties and 2004 —counter-summits, squatting, protests against the PP, responses to the Atocha bombing, etc.— Barcelona activism underwent a period of retreat that was reactivated, this time globally, with the 15M movement in 2011, though before that, from 2003 to 2006, the Platform for Decent Housing, the Housing Assembly and V de Vivienda (H for Housing) appeared, as did the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages in 2011.

As for the photographic culture of the time, in keeping with the model established ten years earlier by Craigie Horsfield’s The City of the People,a period began during which the museum catalysed visual productions that were less acquiescent with the future of the city. Specifically it was the Macba, under the direction of Manuel J. Borja-Villel, that struck out on a path of institutional reinvention, questioning dominant narratives with proposals such as Documentary Processes,¹⁷Antagonisms. Case Studies¹⁸ and Las Agencias, all in 2001, Constructing the Public (2003),¹⁹How Do We Want to Be Governed? (2004),²⁰The Revolution (Will Not Be) Televised (2004)²¹ and Disagreements. On Art, Politics and the Public Sphere in Spain (2003-2005),²² and making Barcelona a nerve centre for the most radical political and artistic experimentation on the European museum scene.

At this point, it is necessary to highlight the work of photographer and curator Jorge Ribalta, who, as director of the Department of Public Programmes of the Macba from 1999 to 2009, carried out an intense review of the historical status and ideological frameworks of the photographic document.²³ Ribalta also promoted the most conscientious reworking of the visual representation of Barcelona from the viewpoint of modernity, drawing on local authors or groups, such as Manolo Laguillo. Barcelona 1978-1997 (2007);²⁴ BarcelonaInternational Photography Centre (1978-1983) (2012), together with Cristina Zelich;²⁵I Work the Street. Joan Colom, Photographs 1957-2010 (2013-2014), with David Balsells,²⁶ and Patrick Faigenbaum and Joan Roca’s Barcelona vista del Besòs (2017-2018), with Jean-François Chevrier.²⁷ He also had some weighty ideas for rethinking Barcelona’s photographic historiography, especially the essay Paradigmas fotográficos en Barcelona, 1860-2004 (2009)²⁸ and Barcelona: The Metropolis in the Age of Photography, 1860-2004 (2016), an exhibition and a book that were key to investigating that period.²⁹

Similarly, there are four photographic series by Jorge Ribalta —“Anonymous Work, Iracheta SL, Can Ricart, Poblenou” (2005), “Futurism” (2005), “Sur l’herbe” (2005-2008) and “New Angels: Scenes of the Remodelling of the Plaça de la Gardunya, Barcelona” (2005-2018)— which, taken as a whole, are a prolonged analysis of Barcelona after the Forum of Cultures, the failure of which is identified by the author as the end of urban growth —from the Cerdà Plan to the “Barcelona model”— that, after 2004, ceased to be useful for the city’s evolution.

Even so, the most in-depth project during this last stage framed by the crisis of 2008 and 15M in 2011 was the photographic investigation project “Metropolitan Images of the New Barcelona”³⁰ (2007-2008), presented in the exhibition Universal Archive, which Ribalta curated.

This study used the photographic survey methodology, and its objective was to construct an image of the emerging city at that moment of great change and absence of identifiable representations.

The proposal was organized under four headings that circumvented topographical approaches, detecting phenomena of relevance in the historical mutation of Barcelona. Taking part were three generations of photographers, each embodying debates about photography in the latter half of the 20th century: from various protagonists of the neorealism of the fifties and sixties, to those who had experimented with new documentary forms in the transition to the next millennium, not forgetting those from the critical conceptual approach.

“Work and Forms of Power” analysed links between the economy, labour systems and power networks, and included reportages by Ahlam Shibli, Marc Pataut, David Goldblatt, Allan Sekula, Patrick Faigenbaum, Sandra Balcells and Jean-Louis Schoellkopf.

“Confluences and Dispersions” explored the changes occurring between the centre and the periphery, and their characterization as dominance and subordination. The photographers featured here were William Klein, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Gilles Saussier, Xavier Ribas, and Xavier Basiana and Ana Muller.

The final heading, “Representations”, looked at various historical points of the city, with interventions by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Lothar Baumgarten and Manolo Laguillo.

Looking at the 116 photographs, one wonders how inherited archetypes are denatured, why no images, no strong images, are available when we need them to understand the spillovers of a city. Seeing history as it happens, making social emergencies visible and producing collective subjectivity were some of the unknowns in this research. Fifteen years later, its questions remain unanswered; however, what used to be a shortcoming or a symptom of the times may now provide the ideological agenda of our photography, the itinerary drawn by the new and old metropolitan majorities.

Valentín Roma is a writer, art historian, exhibitions curator and artistic director of the Virreina Centre de la Imatge.