By using documentary photography, Samuel Aranda has portrayed political and social realities across the world, for media such as The New York Times, Le Monde and National Geographic. Focused mainly on the Middle East and Africa, he has given visibility to themes such as the Ebola pandemic, the Arab revolutions, the refugee crisis or the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In Spain, he has also dealt with themes such as the social impact of the economic crisis with images that generated a big debate, as well as the Catalan independence movement and the many political events which it led to. He is always aware of the impact these events have on people and his photographs show, in great detail, extreme situations in which the photographer bears witness to the best and worst in human beings.
Manel Armengol started off in the field of photography and photojournalism in the seventies. In 1977 he was awarded the Best Press Photography Prize for his images of the demonstrations in Barcelona in 1976, which were published around the world and showed one of the most representative moments in the political transition in Spain. From 1980 to 1987 he focused almost exclusively on photographing the architecture and atmosphere of Catalan modernism. He has held thematic exhibitions on natural elements such as fire, water, earth and wood.
Began his career with a work on horseback between impressionism and Fauvism, in which the central axis was chromatic expressiveness. Not long afterwards, thanks to the dominance of primary colours and the treatment of light, he evolved towards a constructivism that gradually disfigured characters in motion. He would not abandon this decomposition of the human figure even when his artwork moved towards the abstraction driven by the experimentation of stain and gesture. It was not until the second half of the eighties, and until his premature death, that his artwork gave up any figurative reference and entered into informalism, with the application of new materials such as sand, recycled objects or methacrylate, transgressing the limits of the canvas.
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