I WORK THE STREET

Joan Colom (Barcelona, 1921) is one of the most important Spanish photographers of the second half of the 20th century, one of the great renovators of post-war photography and, quite unintentionally, the pioneer of photojournalism in our country.

Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya hosts an exhibition that displays more than 500 photographs spanning the whole of his career. Here you can see his best-known images, taken almost clandestinely in the 1960s in the red-light district of Barcelona’s Barrio Chino: black and white photographs of street life that have become icons.

You’ll also discover Colom’s less familiar side through the reportages he did from the 1990s, where he started to use colour and which are now on show to the public for the first time.

‘I work the street. With my photographs I try to be a kind of notary of an age.’ Joan Colom, 1999.

Buy the catalogue here.