BARCELONA.- The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona is dedicating an exhibition to the Barcelona photographer Xavier Miserachs, whose work has been on long-term loan to the Museum since 2011. The exhibition, focusing on the photobook Barcelona, blanc i negre, offers a journey through time in which the images are arranged in the form of large murals, shop-windows, enlargements and projections, proposing new ways of seeing and reading photographs in the exhibition space. The exhibition – a collaboration between MACBA, curator Horacio Fernández, the studio of Langarita-Navarro Arquitectos and designers Ramón Pez and Laia Abril, and the publisher RM – will include a photography seminar and will make available to the public Miserachs’ archive on long-term loan to the MACBA Study Centre.
In September 1964, the Barcelona photographer Xavier Miserachs published his most celebrated work, Barcelona, blanc i negre, a photobook that brings together nearly four hundred photographs showing the city of Barcelona through its people, images of the everyday life of its inhabitants in a city that was changing by the day.
This work is the fruit of Miserachs’ project to make a strictly photographic book, composed of images that form a set that can be read and watched like a film or novel, more than a book of photographs: a photobook. It follows the model that, at the time, defined the history of photography, marked by the publication of works such as Life is Good & Good for You in New York by William Klein (1956) and The Americans by Robert Frank (1958).
Barcelona, blanc i negre draws on two models. The first is a travelling exhibition initiated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, The Family of Man. It was here that Miserachs realised his true vocation and discovered that the photography that is often called ‘humanistic’ and refers to abstract concepts can also serve to ‘tell, communicate, explain and increase the knowledge of others through our own experience’. The second is identified with the urban photobooks of William Klein, whom Miserachs admired for his ‘highly original way of portraying cities by focusing on the signs provided by their people and spaces’. In the pictures that follow ‘the Klein pattern’ (which dominates in Barcelona, blanc i negre) there is no theme, ‘nothing happens, the image seems taken at random’. The photos are not valid in themselves, as individual images, but only work in the context of the book, which demands that the active reader interpret in their own way these texts without words, these visual stories.
Despite the long history of photobooks, they only recently entered museums of contemporary art, and today the best are considered artworks in their own right for their unique combination of high and low culture and their ability to build complex narratives in the manner of film or literature. The exhibition Miserachs Barcelona begins with the idea that photobooks allow the construction of their own history of photography, closer to life than to art, and proposes several ways of looking at and reading photographs in the gallery space that escape the conventional exhibition format.
In Miserachs Barcelona, the viewer encounters the photos of Barcelona, blanc i negre arranged in the form of large murals, shop-windows, enlargements and projections. It opens with a twilight panorama, both unreal and documentary, that refers to the distant horizons of the cinema. Next, you enter the city, recreated in a Meccano-like construction that evokes the style of exhibition displays during the years in which Miserachs prepared his photobook. It is a model that began in the lecture halls of the Bauhaus and reached its photographic zenith with the portable structures used for The Family of Man. Later, you can literally walk through the pages of Miserachs’ photobook and the crowded streets and squares of a Barcelona without tourists, thanks to big three-dimensional enlargements that transform the space into a stage design in which the viewer becomes an active participant. A further space is dominated by changing projections, in which the viewer is immersed in a past and present that constantly merge. Finally, Barcelona, blanc i negre is displayed on a screen in full detail. Here we also find copies of the photobook and the meandering itineraries followed by Miserachs during its preparation.
On the occasion of the exhibition, MACBA and RM have co-published two versions of the book Miserachs Barcelona (portfolio and library), where the curator Horacio Fernández proposes a new itinerary through Miserachs’ original images, in a reinterpretation of the photographer and his most ambitious work. A further publication is scheduled for 2016, arising from the international seminar on photobooks and museums organised in the context of the exhibition.
From 12 November to 27 March, MACBA will make available to the public a selection of photographic and documentary materials from the Xavier Miserachs Fonds, together with an overview of the working processes that the Archive of the MACBA Study Centre undertook in order to incorporate, catalogue and publicise this important photographic collection.
The Xavier Miserachs Fonds consists of some 60,000 negatives, 20,000 slides, 2,500 contact sheets, correspondence and other documents that reflect the development of the photographer’s career between 1954 and 1998. Since the incorporation of the Fonds at MACBA, thanks to the loan made by the Miserachs family in 2011, the Archive of the Study Centre has worked on the inventory and cataloguing of photographic and documentary materials, which are fully referenced and available for public consultation. With the aim of broadening the knowledge and dissemination of the photographer’s work, a selection of the photographic images in the Fonds has been digitalised and is available for online consultation.
The presentation of the Xavier Miserachs Fonds will take place on 12 November with an open public discussion in which several guest speakers will share their experiences and views on the treatment, classification and uses of the archive in the context of the contemporary art museum.
