Opening: Saturday 27th June, 12 p.m.
Jordi Barón (Barcelona, 1973) is a photographer, antiques dealer and collector. He has been working on an ongoing project for many years to recover photographic heritage, focused on anonymous images and scattered archives that form part of the collective visual memory. This exhibition presents, for the first time, a selection of over three hundred vernacular photographs from the artist’s private collection, dating from the period 1945 to 2000.
These photographs came from flea markets, photography fairs and vacated homes in Barcelona and surrounding areas, and they have been gathered together and arranged over the decades to create a unique archive of everyday life in the twentieth century. The exhibition sets up compositions of intentioned dialogue between photographs, while others are presented in a more random way, and it includes images that are quite personal, ambiguous and transgressive in nature – often clandestine, exhibitionist or voyeuristic – which, in many cases, had only been shared amongst close confidants.
Carnivals, travels, slums, pious rituals, dedicated portraits, nudes or stolen scenes comprise a heterogenous mosaic that reveals ways of seeing and representing the world that is far removed from the official narratives. In addition to the individual topics, these photographs share a common theme of having been rescued and recontextualized through the collector’s gaze, which activates them as sensitive documents and opens them up to new interpretations.
Thus, Domestic flashback proposes a reflection on the value of vernacular photography and the role of collectors in the preservation of a fragile and often invisible memory. In stark contrast to the overabundance of contemporary images, this exhibition retrieves a time when taking photographs was an exceptional gesture.
Exhibition curated by Fèlix Pérez-Hita.
Join our
