Untitled

Technique

Gelatin silver print

Dimensions

Tinted: 31,8 x 39,9 cm (12 1/2 x 15 11/16 in.)
Paper size: 38 x 45,9 cm (14 15/16 x 18 1/16 in.)

Inventory

FM000490

Description

The street is the central theme in Joan Colom’s work. In 1999 he wrote: “I didn’t know at the time that I was doing social photography. I was only doing photography and looked for images that would excite me. Sometimes I have used this term to define my work […] I work the street”. Colom shows us a sordid and dark neighborhood in Barcelona; el Raval, where people only partially reveal themselves because here is where the body is traded.

The photographs have been taken over just three years (1958 to 1961), a period of intense creative energy if we take into account that he began to photograph in 1957 without any formal training. The 1961 exhibition of these photgraphs was called The Street (La calle), and was such a success that the photographs were published three years later in the prestigious Word and Image collection with text by Camilo José Cela.

Most of these photographs were taken without the consent of the subjects, with a Leica that sometimes Colom hid or shot without focusing the scene so as not to be spotted, sometimes in motion, without aesthetic intentions.  The result is direct images, without compromise, in the purest documentarystyle, very close to photojournalism which gives an appearance of truthfulness and spontaneity not seen in Spanish photography until that point. Colom belongs to a generation of Spanish photographers who, in the second half of the fifties, renewed the language of photography and incorporated it into the avant-garde trends of this time. 

The most surprising thing about Colom’s images is the power of a relatively small body of work, developed with astonishing coherence and intensity. Two aspects are particularly innovative: the theme, a frank look at prostitution at the height of the Franco era, and the method, framing from below and blurred images, the result of the surreptitious manner necessary  to capture this type of photography. Method and content reinforce each other to achieve a look that is voyeuristic which makes us even closer participants in his vision, that evasive sidelong glance, wanting to see without looking.