CATALÀ-ROCA

In 2022 it will be one hundred years since the birth in Valls, Tarragona, of one of the benchmarks of Spanish photography: Francesc Català-Roca. The book that celebrates its anniversary brings together around 150 images, some of them unpublished, along with other iconic ones, selected especially for this publication.

A journey through the history of this photographer who portrayed the protagonists of the bohemian and cultural life of the time in an immense work of documentation of urban and rural life, while capturing the social, political and cultural environment like no one else that surrounded him. A photographer who revolutionized street photography with iconic images of everyday reality.

Francesc Català-Roca was born in 1922. The son and father of photographers, his work in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s represented the emergence of new street photography in Spain, comparable to Henri Cartier Bresson or Robert Doisneau. He toured Spain for half a century and portrayed the transition from the rural to the urban world. With his camera he recorded a unique testimony that he jealously treasured in an archive with more than two hundred thousand negatives. He won the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1983, being the first photographer to obtain this recognition.