Miserachs Barcelona

Xavier Miserachs photographed Barcelona as a city that was still being lived in rather than looked at, and this catalogue is the argument that his 1964 book belongs among the great European city books.

MACBA and RM Verlag co-published it in 2015 for the exhibition of the same name, which ran at the museum from 18 September 2015 to 27 March 2016 under the curator Horacio Fernandez. The 128-page volume reproduces 68 photographs selected from the 371 that made up Barcelona blanc i negre, Miserachs's own 1964 publication, and it is printed as a trilingual edition in Catalan, English and Spanish with a design by Ramon Pez and Laia Abril. The pictures are of families out walking, children in the streets, flea markets, workers leaving the factories and migrants' luggage stacked at the railway station, made by day and by night across the city's neighbourhoods, with William Klein and Francesc Catala-Roca as the acknowledged points of reference.

Miserachs (1937-1998) worked in Barcelona through the late Franco years and is now read as one of the central figures of Spanish photojournalism. A second, separate edition of this catalogue was issued for the same exhibition under the same title but with different contents; this is the library edition.