In 1957, when Joan Colon decided to journey through the streets of Barcelona with his Leica camera, the territory that opened up before his eyes was the Raval and its surroundings. This neighborhood encapsulated the port spirit of the city and all its contrasts, and during the difficult 1950s, under Franco’s dictatorship, constituted a truly marginal world.

With hardly any previous training and over the course of a mere three years, from 1958 to 1961, Joan Colom constructed a photographic corpus with a personal style and an array of characteristics that defined and confirmed his work as fully modern. This went beyond the people appearing in his images, who he captured furtively; ultimately the main focus of his work was the street. His attention was directed at the potency of the place, at its dynamism; the street as a manifestation of the neighborhood’s vital pulse. Colom’s gaze surveys the street in search of its ability to configure surprising situations that are outside the norm, different from what was occurring in the rest of the city.

His work has helped to reconstruct the memory and imagery of the city and the Raval neighborhood. Entitled El carrer [The Street], these photographs were first exhibited in 1961 at Sala Aixelà in Barcelona and at the Real Sociedad Fotográfica in Madrid several months later.