Architecture, which obviously has to do with the world of ideas, is expressed and carried out in the material, physical, objectual world. Thus the importance of images for its transmission, dissemination and knowledge.
Formerly lithographs and drawings (here we present a sample of Piranesi in this line) and later, with the appearance of photography, with this as the usual means of transmission.
Remember that photography, as an artistic activity that operates on reality, poses a specific relationship with it. There is never an abstract description of something. Any description always requires a previous analysis, an evaluation. Photography always proposes a way of looking at the object, a point of view, a light, a space?

The great photographers have always brought new visions of what seemed obvious to us, or new realities that, although they were close, we did not see them.
This collection, a sample of which is presented here, shows some moments of this interaction with the photographic vision of the reality of architecture and the city in our culture between the 1980s and the present.
This exhibition brings together several issues and points out the presence of various references between these years. From Francesc Catalá Roca (father of the photography of the subject among us) to Jordi Bernadó or Manolo Laguillo through the very important figure of Humberto Rivas. The presence of the city of Barcelona, in different places and moments, with multiple visions, appears here frequently as a scenario.
The pre-Socratic philosophy (Heraclitus and his disciples) defined the physical world, nature, as being composed of the so-called four elements (fire, water, earth, air). I have always believed in the usefulness and interest of using these principles in our activities. An important part of this collection gravitates around these elements and their vision from photography.

Barcelona, niños jugando en un solar
Francesc Català-Roca
c.1950

And finally, although relatively unusual, there is the opposite view. The architect as photographer.
The great Spanish architect (an indispensable reference in the local and international field of his time) José Antonio Coderch, develops a parallel activity as a photographer. In this case around a theme of his own: the vision of the interaction of the bullfighter and the bull, as a very special kinetic vision; between immobile and dynamic.
Evidently, there would be another important argument not developed here, which is the interaction of the concrete work in its description, therefore, also its photographers. Perhaps because I am too close to this argument, in my work, I prefer to see the question in a more general, distant way.

Barcelona, July 2024.

Josep Lluís Mateo