Joan Colom: Album

Spanish photographer Joan Colom (born 1921) is one of the great chroniclers of Catalan culture, in particular of Barcelona’s working classes and its criminal underworld during the 1950s and 60s. Colom spent years on the streets of Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood, with a camera surreptitiously attached to his waist, thoroughly documenting a world little recorded in the annals of Spanish photography. This volume is a facsimile edition of a photo album that Colom prepared for the gallery owner and photography critic Josep Maria Casademont sometimes in the mid- to late 1960s, which was recently integrated into the collection of the Fundación Foto Colectania. The photographs, some of them never before published, were taken between 1958 and 1964, and all derive from Colom’s classic series Gente de la calle (Street People). The album was laid out by Colum with superb narrative rhythm, which renders this facsimile edition an exquisite artist’s book.