Photography, as an artistic activity that operates upon reality, establishes a specific relationship with architecture. There is never an abstract description of anything. Any description always calls for prior analysis and evaluation. Photography always proposes a way of looking at the object: a point of view, a light, a space…
Great photographers have always contributed new visions of what seemed evident to us, or have made us see new realities that, although close at hand, had gone unnoticed.
The photographic collection of Obra Oberta presents certain moments of this interaction through the photographic vision of the reality of architecture and the city in our culture from the 1980s to the present day. The presence of the city of Barcelona, in different places and moments, and through multiple perspectives, often appears here as a setting.

Silo junto al puerto.
Manolo Laguillo
1980

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

Presocratic philosophy (Heraclitus and his disciples) defined the physical world, nature, as being composed of the four elements (fire, water, earth, air). I have always believed in the usefulness and interest of applying these principles to our activities. An important part of this collection revolves around these elements and their interpretation through photography.
And finally, although relatively uncommon, we encounter the reverse perspective: the architect as photographer. The great Spanish architect (an indispensable reference in both the local and international fields of his time) José Antonio Coderch developed a parallel activity as a photographer. In this case, it focused on a subject of his own: the interaction between the bullfighter and the bull, conceived as a very particular kinetic vision; between stillness and dynamism.

Evidently, there would be another important argument not developed here: the interaction of the specific work in its representation and, therefore, also with the photographers who portray it. Perhaps because of my close proximity to this issue in my own work, I prefer to approach the matter in a more general, more detached way.