Joan Colom

The most acclaimed chronicler of Catalan culture, Joan Colom (born 1921) is one of the most important Spanish photographers of the second half of the twentieth century. This book presents more than 500 photographs spanning the whole of his career. It includes his best-known images of the 1950s and 60s, taken somewhat clandestinely in the red-light district of Barcelona's famous Barrio Chino--black-and-white portrayals of the city's street life and underworld that have since become iconic. Also included is a less familiar side of Colom's career--his reportage of the 1990s, in which he began to use color, surveyed here for the first time. This 464-page monograph is published on the occasion of a major exhibition at The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, to whom Colom donated his massive archive.

Spanish photographer Joan Colom (born 1921) is one of the great chroniclers of Catalan culture, in particular of Barcelona’s working classes and its criminal underworld during the 1950s and 60s. Colom spent years on the streets of Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood, with a camera surreptitiously attached to his waist, thoroughly documenting a world little recorded in the annals of Spanish photography. This volume is a facsimile edition of a photo album that Colom prepared for the gallery owner and photography critic Josep Maria Casademont sometimes in the mid- to late 1960s, which was recently integrated into the collection of the Fundación Foto Colectania. The photographs, some of them never before published, were taken between 1958 and 1964, and all derive from Colom’s classic series Gente de la calle (Street People). The album was laid out by Colum with superb narrative rhythm, which renders this facsimile edition an exquisite artist’s book.