BARCELONA.- In 2011 MACBA received on loan the archive of Xavier Miserachs, consisting of some 60,000 negatives, 20,000 transparencies, 2,500 contact sheets, correspondence and other documents that reflect the development of the photographer’s career between 1954 and 1998.

The exhibition A.XMI, a title taken from the identification code of the Xavier Miserachs Fonds in MACBA’s Archive, makes available to the public a selection of photographs, documents, books and magazines, 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.

Among the documents included in this exhibition, of particular note are those that were used to produce the most relevant photobooks in the history of photography in our country: Barcelona, blanc i negre, Costa Brava Show and Los cachorros.

Together with these projects, the exhibition also aims to highlight the variety of fields in which Miserachs developed his career, such as advertising and publishing commissions, his intense production as a photojournalist, portraits of a private nature and of personalities from the socio-cultural world, photographs of the daily lives of the bourgeoisie and the working classes, as well as cinematographic projects.

With the aim of broadening the knowledge and preservation of the documents, a selection of the photographic images has been digitalised and can be consulted in the exhibition’s reading space. The complete Fonds is available for consultation at the Archive and Library of the MACBA Study Centre.

The Xavier Miserachs Fonds 1954–98
The Xavier Miserachs Fonds, collected by the photographer throughout his professional career, has been on loan at MACBA’s Study Centre since 3 February 2011. The Fonds consists of 80,000 photographic images: 60,000 negatives and 20,000 slides or transparencies, plus 2,500 contact sheets, administrative paperwork and a few notebooks. It was collected over a period of forty-four years (1954–98) and is structured in series representing some of the most important photobooks in the history of photography in our country: Barcelona, blanc i negre, Costa Brava Show and Los cachorros, as well as numerous travel accounts.

In order to preserve, catalogue and research such vast quantities of material, the Miserachs family decided to deposit at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) the personal archive of Xavier Miserachs (Barcelona, 1937–1998), undoubtedly one of the great masters of Spanish photography. Added to this are the original contact sheets of Barcelona, blanc i negre, which the photographer had given to the historian Maria Dolors Tapias in 1991 as a thank you present for her collaboration in the reordering of the negatives in the archive, and which had also been deposited at MACBA by Tapias so that they would join the rest of the material.

The loan of the Miserachs Fonds is in line with one of the main objectives of MACBA’s Study Centre: to preserve the artistic heritage of the 1950s and sixties, a particularly rich time for the photographic avant-garde in Catalonia and Spain. The first step in this task was the incorporation of the personal documentation owned by the photography critic Josep Maria Casademont (Barcelona, 1928–1994), one of the most relevant personalities of the photography scene in Barcelona at the time. Casademont coined the phrase ‘new avant-garde’ in Spanish photography and was the director of Sala Aixelà, where an important exhibition of Xavier Miserachs, Ricard Terré and Ramon Masats was held in 1959.

Miserachs collected this material throughout his professional career. In the sixties the archive was flooded and part of the material was damaged. In the late eighties, he reorganised the negatives and contact sheets with the help of the historian Maria Dolors Tapias Gil, a task for which she was given as a present the original contact sheets of the photobook Barcelona, blanc i negre. The reordering of the archive as a result of that process has been preserved intact.

After the photographer’s death, the Fonds were kept and administered by his two daughters, who inherited the rights of exploitation and the exercise of the author’s moral rights. At the end of 2009, MACBA’s Study Centre contacted the two heiresses. It was the beginning of a process culminating on 3 February 2011 with the signature of a document agreeing to a 25-year loan of the archive to the Study Centre.

Xavier Miserachs was born in Barcelona on 12 July 1937, the son of Manuel Miserachs, a haematologist, and Montserrat Ribalta, a librarian. As a teenager, Miserachs and his classmates Ramon and Antoni Fabregat came into contact with photography whilst studying at the Institut Tècnic Eulàlia. In 1952, he joined the photography club Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya, where he met Oriol Maspons, forging what was to be a lifelong friendship. In 1954, when he was just seventeen, he won the First Luis Navarro Trophy, awarded at the Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya’s Second National Modern Photography Show. That same year he began to study medicine, although he eventually dropped out in his final year in order to devote himself to photography.

The first of two now-legendary exhibitions featuring photographs by Xavier Miserachs, Ricard Terré and Ramón Masats was held in 1957, and toured to the Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Agrupación Fotográfica de Almería (AFAL) and the Real Sociedad Fotográfica in Madrid. This first exhibition signalled the start of what the Barcelona critic Josep Maria Casademont called the ‘new avant-garde’ in Spanish photography. Two years later, in 1959, Terré, Miserachs and Masats presented their second collective show at the recently-inaugurated Sala Aixelà in Barcelona, which was directed by Casademont.

On completion of his military service in 1961, Miserachs set up his own studio, where he combined commissions as a professional photographer with work that would later form part of his acclaimed photobooks published in the 1960s: Barcelona, blanc i negre (Aymà, 1964), Costa Brava Show (Kairós, 1966) and Los cachorros (Lumen, 1967). One of Miserachs’ main influences was the work of the photographer William Klein, particularly his books on different cities. The exhibition The Family of Man (1955) made a deep impression on Miserachs, as it did on many of his generation, to the point where it determined a new neo-realist poetics representing the move of the working classes into the new urban surroundings.

From the late-1960s, Miserachs expanded his work as a photographer to include advertising, news reports and, on many occasions, photography books. From 1966, he was constantly on the move thanks to his work as a correspondent for publications such as La Actualidad Española, Gaceta Ilustrada, La Vanguardia, Interviú and Triunfo, with which he signed an exclusive contract in 1968, leading to his seminal reports ‘París se pregunta: ¿es una revolución’ (Paris asks itself: Is it a revolution?); ‘De Nanterre a las barricadas (From Nanterre to the barricades); ‘La primavera en Praga’ (The Prague Spring), among others. In 1969, he co-founded the Eina School, becoming its first photography teacher, and in 1970 his activities briefly extended to film, when he was the artistic director and director of photography on two underground films directed by Enrique Vila-Matas and Emma Cohen. That same year, he also directed and produced the short film, Amén, historieta muda.

During the last years of his life, Miserachs took up writing with a view to leaving testimony to his ideas about photography, ideas that were embodied in a belligerent approach to what he considered the dominant photographic culture and its institutions. The most notable results of this enterprise include his last two books, Fulls de contactes. Memòries (Edicions 62, 1998) and Criterio fotográfico (Omega, 1998), both published in the year of his death.

Xavier Miserachs died on 14 August 1998, at the age of 61, shortly after receiving the Creu de Sant Jordi, awarded to him by the Catalan Government.