Projects: four decades

29 photographic series invite you to explore the mark left on the urban landscape by the passage of time, human impact, the passing of fashions or economic currents. The work 'Oporto' is being shown for the first time and it is also the first time that 'The provinces 2014-2015' can be seen in its entirety.

Through his gaze, the artist shows landscapes with impeccable photographic workmanship, with a "dry and direct" style, which challenges the viewer, provoking the unsettling sensation of missing out on something.

Commissioner: Valentín Roma

"From Benjamin to Barthes many (...) have agreed that a photograph is the trace of an absence (...) I will try (...) to follow the inverse path from the presence to the trace and from the trace to what is supposedly absent". (Juan José Lahuerta) 

The career of Manolo Laguillo (Madrid, 1953) occupies a crucial position in the urban documentary photography that has developed in Spain over the last four decades. His work began in the late seventies, when he began to photograph the outskirts of Barcelona and its old quarter. Later, in the second half of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, his images recorded the process of metropolitan transformation before and after the 1992 Olympic Games.

In addition to Barcelona, Laguillo has carried out numerous projects that explore enclaves as diverse as Mexico, New York, Berlin, Oporto and Madrid, among others. Among them, there are some that slowly travel through cities that knew better times. Times of bonanza vanished through an inexorable passage of time that lowered them from their status of social or economic centre. 

Manolo Laguillo incorporates into the technical precision of the document a type of register that voluntarily preserves substantial features of the passer-by's experience, a way of portraying the urban landscape at ground level, as if the movement were also being represented.

Download here the room sheet

BIOGRAPHY

Graduate in philosophy and Germanic philology from the University of Barcelona (1975). He has been professor of photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona since 1996, where he was previously a non-tenured lecturer from 1980 to 1989 and a full professor from 1989 to 1996. From 1986 to 1992 he was visiting professor of photography at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (School of Fine Arts) in Braunschweig, Germany. He has translated Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel and Siegfried Kracauer into Spanish.

 
More information on the artist's website

Pseudopanorama is a book published with La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. Guided by the concept of Moritz Küng, the work brings together seven projects by the photographer Manolo Laguillo from 2014 to 2020, accompanied by a critical essay by Juan José Lahuerta. The publication is completed by an exhaustive chronology of Laguillo's career, an artist considered a benchmark in urban documentary photography, a photographer with a descriptive and direct style that appeals to the viewer.