Humberto Rivas, creator of images
Final days in which to see the exhibition of an artist who was central to the development of photography in Spain
Art
The work of the Spanish photographer Rivas ushered in a new way of documenting that sought to reflect the impact of the times, culture and memory. The eye of the beholder is ever-present in his images, always offering the possibility of dialog.
But Humberto Rivas was not only a great constructor of images. He was also an artist central to the development of photography in Spain from the first half of the 1960s onwards. His arrival in Barcelona from Buenos Aires in 1976 had a major impact on the local artistic scene and boosted the recognition of photography as a support for artistic creation.
His portraits are set against barely distinguishable backgrounds; the most significant element is always the specific subject of the image. His protagonists, who “choose it to be recorded by his camera”, all conform to a peculiar contradiction: they are landscapes without people or people without a landscape; either one or the other, but never together in the same image.