Photography 
Barcelona was one of the first cities in the world where daguerreotypes were made. The first to be taken, from the roof of a building in the Plaça de la Constitució, was made by the engraver Ramon Alabern i Casas on 10 November 1839, and the occasion was a festive public event. This picture was subsequently exhibited at the Acadèmia and raffled amongst those present. It is not known whether has survived to this day.
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Aixafem el feixisme. Pere Català Pic.
Comissariat de propaganda de la
Generalitat. 1936
Photography began to take hold as a business and gained public recognition during the 19th century as it grew to be an important cultural force of the times. The first generation of Catalan photographers, all of them with a Pictorialist approach, included Pere Casas Abarca (1875-1958), Joan Vilatobà (1878-1954) and Claudi Carbonell Flo (1891-1970). Of these pioneers, the most outstanding figure in the field of Pictorialism, and one who can be seen as a bridge to the second generation in view of his influence, was Joaquim Pla Janini (1879-1970).
After a number of attempts to form associations, in 1923 the Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya came into existence, which brought the new photographers together around Pla Janini and Carbonell. The Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya Museum now preserves more than 25,000 stereoscopic glass negatives of Catalonia and other parts of Europe. There were two new innovative voices among that second generation of photographers. One of them, Joan Porqueras (1889-1969), who chose the city as his theme, distanced himself from Pictorialist principles; the other, Antoni Campañà (1906-1989), studied in Munich with Willi Zielke and obtained first-hand knowledge of new German approaches in photography, which he also applied in his photojournalistic work.
Until the early 20th century, there were no professional press photographers in Catalonia. The most notable pioneers of Catalan photojournalism were Alexandre Merletti (1860-1943), who made a special camera to obtain the only existing picture of the summary trial of the teacher Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia; and Josep Brangulí (1879-1946) and Carlos Pérez de Rozas (1883-1954), important groundbreakers in the field of photojournalism in Catalonia.
In 1906 the first specialised sports newspaper El Mundo Deportivo, was published, and amongst its contributors was the leader in this field at the time, Josep M. Co de Triola (1884-1965). With the adoption of the rotogravure process by the newspapers El Día Gráfico and La Vanguardia, photojournalism progressively took hold, and in the 1920s Josep M. de Sagarra i Plana (1894-1959), Pau Lluís Torrents (1891-1966) and Josep Gaspar (1892-1970) were the most active practitioners.
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Oriol Maspons and Colita. Efe
Interest in photography grew, with exhibitions in art galleries and the appearance of specialised journals, and a prominent presence of photography in art magazines, notably, the cosmopolitan D’ací d’allà. The First International Salon of Photography was held on the occasion of the 1929 Barcelona World’s Fair. Thus, in the late 1920s there was a certain opening up to new trends, even though Pictorialism would remain dominant until the 50s. The leading Catalan exponent of New Objectivism was Emili Godés (1895-1970), who captured Realism in his photographs of the World’s Fair buildings and pavilions. He was not the only one to take an interest in avant-garde trends. A leading figure in the fields of advertising and architectural photography, with a style half-way between New Objectivity and the New Vision, was Josep Sala (1896-1962), who often worked with the architect Josep Lluís Sert. Another practitioner of advertising photography was Josep Masana (1894-1979), who combined this work with portraiture of showbusiness personalities. From 1930 onwards other photographers turned to New Objectivism and Constructivism, leaving aside the salon photography that had characterised them until then. The most representative examples of this trend are Antoni Arisa (1900-1980) and Josep M. Lladó (1903-1956).
The most important figure in the field of avant-garde photography was the multi-faceted Pere Català Pic (1889-1971), the first Catalan theoretician of photography, who worked hard to spread word of the most avant-garde new European trends, particularly the German New Vision, in articles published in various photographic and art magazines. Amongst theoreticians we must also mention Salvador Dalí, who wrote several articles on the subject, notably La dada fotogràfica (1929) published in the journal La gaseta de les Arts.
Català Pic was also an outstanding advertising photographer, working with photomontage and experimenting with abstraction, influenced by Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy. During the Spanish Civil War he headed the Catalan government’s Commissariat for Propaganda, where Sala and Massana also worked, designing posters, magazines and books. It was then, in 1936, that Català Pic created the mythical poster Aixafem el feixisme [Crush Fascism], considered to be one of the best publicity photographs of the first half of the 20th century. In the field of political photomontage the most internationally-significant figure from Catalan culture during the 20th century was the Valencian Josep Renau (1907-1982).
Joan Fontcuberta. Efe
Catalan photojournalism underwent modernisation thanks to Agustí Centelles i Ossó (1909-1985). In the years of the Second Republic, Centelles was anPhotographer Agustí Centelles I Ossó (1909 – 1985) moved Catalan photojournalism forward. innovator in the field of press photography, particularly after 1934, when he acquired a Leica. His use of this camera during the Spanish Civil War established him as a leading 20th-century photographer, with some of his pictures appearing in the most important international newspapers and magazines of the time. Centelles went into exile in 1939, taking part of his archive with him in a suitcase: almost five thousand 35 mm negatives were hidden for decades in France until, with the death of Franco in 1975, he was able to recover one of the most important photographic legacies of the Second Republic and the Civil War, as well as exceptional images from the months he spent in the French concentration camp of Bram.
After the Civil War many other photographers were obliged to go into exile. Of those that remained, some disappeared from public life or let go of their aesthetic principles in order to survive. Many photojournalists were purged by the regime. One example of this repression is Josep M. Pérez Molinos (1921-2004), who after the war was appointed official photographer to the Civil Governor of Barcelona. In 1942 his political past was discovered and he was obliged to abandon the profession. Shortly before his death some negatives came to light that had been saved in the family home, showing the war, the post-war period and some events from the early part of the Franco occupation, such as the visit by a member of the Nazi high command, Heinrich Himmler, to Barcelona.
The remaining photographers fell in with the dictatorship’s aesthetic criteria, which turned once again to Pictorialism. In the early 1950s, photographic societies and exhibitions were the bastion of photography, which suffered a serious decline. Outside of this salon context there arose the figure of Francesc Català Roca (1922-1998), one of Català Pic’s sons, who having learnt the trade with his father began to work independently of him in 1948, thus beginning a long and influential career as a photodocumentalist. Notable from the decade of the 1940s is the personal work of Joaquim Gomis (1902-1991), with his photoscopes (an invented word which means examine through light), who, together with Català Roca, served as a bridge toward the future.
The new generation of photographers that explored other options beyond the regime’s Pictorialism did not enter the scene until the 1950s; they included Oriol Maspons (1928), Julio Ubiña (1922-1988), Joan Colom (1921), Ramon Masats (1931), Eugeni Forcano (1926), Xavier Miserachs (1937-1998), Ricard Terré (1928), Leopold Pomés (1931)—who moved into advertising photography—and, subsequently, Colita (1940). A key figure during this period was Josep Maria Casademont, who as a theoretician, critic and supporter of the art of photography, brought it to public attention through the Sala Aixelà gallery and the publication of specialised books and magazines.
As the Franco dictatorship gave way to the transition to democracy, with the consequent recovery of freedom of the press, a new generation of press photographers took to the streets to capture the historic moment and start professional careers that continue at the present time, these include names such as Manel Armengol, Paco Elvira, Pepe Encinas, Joan Guerrero, Tino Soriano, Kim Manresa or Jordi Socías, together with younger workers such as Pedro Madueño, Sandra Balcells or Txema Salvans. Notable names in the realm of artistic photography are Pere Formiguera, Toni Catany and Manel Esclusa. Special mention must be made of photograher Joan Fontcuberta whose works have a firm theoretical base which then move beyond aesthetics into ideological contemplation.
