Monumento a Colón (Columbus Monument)

In 1931 Francesc Català-Roca’s family moved from Valls to Barcelona, where his father, Pere Català Pic, worked in advertising photography. Català-Roca stopped working for his father and started out on his own in 1948, doing street photography on commission for publishing companies. One such project was the photo-book Barcelona, done for Barna publishers in September 1954, which contained a prologue by Luis Romero that was really simply a commentary on a photographic narrative that follows neither an architectural nor a touristic line. Català-Roca preferred the content to be human, people in the streets going about their business, in compositions that are often reminiscent of the modern photography in the annual photo reports of the 1930s.

Horacio Fernández