Projects: four decades

29 photographic series invite viewers to explore the mark left on the urban landscape by the passage of time, human impact, changing fashions, and economic trends. The work 'Oporto' is being shown for the first time, and this is also the first opportunity to view 'Las provincias 2014-2015' in its entirety.

Through his gaze, the artist shows landscapes with impeccable photographic craftsmanship, with a "dry and direct" style that challenges the viewer, provoking the unsettling feeling of missing something.

Curator: Valentín Roma

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

The career of Manolo Laguillo (Madrid, 1953) occupies a crucial position within the urban documentary tradition that has developed in Spain over the last four decades. His work began in the late 1970s, when he started photographing the outskirts of Barcelona and its old town. 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 exploring such diverse locations as Mexico City, New York, Berlin, Porto, and Madrid, among others. Some of these projects slowly traverse cities that have seen better days. Times of prosperity have faded away with the inexorable passage of time, stripping these cities of their status as social or economic centers. 

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

Download the exhibition brochure here

BIOGRAPHY

He holds a degree in philosophy and Germanic philology from the University of Barcelona (1975). He has been a professor of photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona since 1996, where he was previously a non-tenured professor from 1980 to 1989 and a tenured professor from 1989 to 1996. Between 1986 and 1992, he was a visiting professor of photography at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (College 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

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