With the idea of investigating the idyll that photographers and filmmakers have maintained with the modern city during the last century, as witnesses to the most crucial moments that have marked its history and its evolution, he arrives at CaixaForum Camera and city , an exhibition that beyond showing a journey through the history of the urban image, it delves into the social, political and urban transformations of cities, as well as their characters, through a visual essay that dialogues at the same time with the evolution of the photography and cinema.
This sample, which ended this Tuesday in Madrid and will be exhibited until next October 12 after passing through Barcelona, is the first fruit born from the agreement signed between the Pompidou Center and the Fundación la Caixa to collaborate in the organization of joint exhibitions until the year 2024, and it is included within the cultural program that the Catalan institution is running to put in value the most contemporary artistic manifestations as well as the great visual creators of the 20th century.
Camera and city. Urban life in photography and cinema exhibits along the route 259 works by 81 artists that include photographs, films, videos and printed material that span from the 1910s to the beginning of 2010, although it also makes a leap in the way to not to forget the transformation that the Covid-19 has brought about in the cities .
The works of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Strand, László Moholy-Nagy , William Klein, Diane Arbus, Brassaï or Robert Doisneau, Robert Frank, Margaret Michaelis, André Kertész, Alexander Rodchenko or Lee Friedlander stand out, at the international level, in the exhibition, which includes, at the same level, national names such as Joan Colom, Manel Armengol, Pilar Aymerich , Francesc Català-Roca, Leopoldo Pomés, Carlos Pérez de Rozas, Anna Malagrida, Agustí Centelles, Josep Brangulí, Jorge Ribalta, Xavier Ribas or Francesc Torres.
The creations of these artists come from the archives of the French center , which has the most important collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe, as well as from the main Spanish , public and private photography collections , such as the National Archive of Catalonia, the Fundación Foto Colectania, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), the Reina Sofía or the Caixa collection itself, among others.
Through images, the modern city is seen as a stage, where its inhabitants are its actors, in which its history of expansion and decline is narrated, from moments of euphoria to those marked by loneliness, melancholy, revolt and fight .
Thus, the exhibition, curated by Florian Ebner , head of the Photography Department of the Pompidou Center, with the collaboration of Marta Dahó, PhD in Art History, researcher and teacher, embraces the most important moments in the modern city in the social sphere, political, economic, urban and architectural, captured through the lens of photography and cinema, which evolve in parallel to the cities.
The exhibition, structured in 10 areas, makes a chronological journey that begins with the iconic image of Paul Strand Blind Woman ( Female Ciega , 1916), a portrait of the prestigious and influential American photographer took the hidden camera and exemplifying to through an urban image focused on a subject, the aesthetics of modern photography . A work that dialogues in space with a film by the same author, made jointly with the painter Charles Sheeler in 1921, Manhatta - where the verticality and steel structures of New York are praised -, and a contemporary diptych by Martí Llorens on the demolition of buildings in pre-Olympic Barcelona .
At the beginning of the exhibition the topic of the vertical city is also dealt with , which corresponds to the end of the First World War, when there was a great euphoria regarding the city, modernity, technology and progress.
The 1930s were particularly prominent in the exhibition, when photographers and filmmakers pointed to the proletarian population that wanders the streets and to the nocturnal characters, represented with images of Brassaï, as well as to the events marked by republican Spain and the Civil War , captured by the cameras of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Pere Català Pic, Agustí Centelles, Gabriel Casas and Carlos Pérez de Rozas.
The humanist photography and existentialist reflected in the exhibition the end of World War II, moment of glory for street images, with outstanding figures like Robert Doisneau, William Klein Robert Frank, or the Spanish Joan Colom, Francesc Català-Roca and Leopoldo Pomes .
The gaze of photographers became much more critical from the sixties, when the streets of the city witnessed the revolution and protest , such as May '68. Also, the repression of the last years of Francoism or La Transition was You can see at this point of the journey through the eyes of Manel Manel Armengol, Tino Calabuig and Pilar Aymerich.
Going forward in time and in the exhibition, the horizontal city becomes important , with still and moving images that revolve around the growth of the peripheries and that collects the bird's-eye views of the Google Earth and Google Street View platforms.
As a final point, some of the previous artists reflect on the influence of the Covid-19 and confinement through videos, photographs, performances , drawings and sculptures where you can see images of cities like Barcelona, Paris or New York empty.
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