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The seminar MISERACHS BARCELONA PHOTOBOOKS revolves around Xavier Miserachs' 1964 photobook Barcelona, blanc i negre and the associated exhibition currently at MACBA. The colloquium will explore the story behind the publication of Barcelona, blanc i negre, its public reception, and its place in the history of photobooks in general and of photobooks on cities in particular. It will also consider photobook collecting, photobooks in the museum space, and their public life extended through reissues. Finally, there will also be sessions on the issue of photobook exhibitions, including a lecture on the different set-ups of photography exhibitions over time, and a roundtable specifically on Miserachs Barcelona.

Curated by Horacio Fernández

SPEAKERS

Horacio Fernández
The curator of the exhibition, Horacio Fernández, is a specialist in photobooks, having both studied the subject and curated related exhibitions such as Fotografía pública (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1999), El fotolibro latinoamericano (Paris, Madrid, New York, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Lima, 2012–14) and Fotos y libros. España 1905–1977, first seen at the Museo Reina Sofía last year and now touring.

Joan Fontcuberta
Joan Fontcuberta was born in Barcelona in 1955. He has been involved in a wide range of activities in the world of photography, as a creator, teacher, critic, curator and historian. He is a visiting lecturer at universities in France, Britain and the United States and regularly collaborates with specialised publications. He is the author of a dozen books and essays on the history of photography, such as El beso de Judas. Fotografía y verdad (1997), Ciencia y fricción (1998) and La cámara de Pandora (2010). There are thirty papers published about his work as a creator.
Since his first solo exhibition in Barcelona in 1974, his work has been exhibited in museums around the world (including: MoMA, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; IVAM, Valencia; FOAM, Amsterdam; and MEP, Paris) and has been acquired by numerous public collections (including: MET, New York; MACBA, Barcelona; Folkwang Museum, Essen; Centre Pompidou, Paris). Among other honours, in 2013 he received the Hasselblad Award.

Manolo Laguillo
Born in Madrid in 1953, Manolo Laguillo is Professor of Photography at the Universitat de Barcelona. His decades-long work depicting Barcelona was shown at MACBA in 2007 (Barcelona 1978–1997…). In 2013 the Museo ICO, Madrid, exhibited a representative selection of his series on other cities (Razón y ciudad). He has recently completed the project Las provincias 2014–2015, within the context of Tender puentes (Museo Universitario de Navarra). In September 2015 he received the SUMMA prize for his 2014 work on the Madrid district of Lavapiés.

Lesley A. Martin
Lesley A. Martin is the creative director of the Aperture Foundation and publisher of The PhotoBook Review. She has curated exhibitions that have travelled both nationally and internationally, including The Ubiquitous Image and Aperture Remix, a commission-based exhibition celebrating Aperture’s sixtieth anniversary. She has edited more than eighty-five photobooks, including Rinko Kawauchi’s Illuminance, The New York Times Magazine Photographs, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s The Notion of Family and forthcoming books by Richard Misrach and Gregory Crewdson. In addition to her work on The Chinese Photobook, she was a contributing editor to Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s and The Latin American Photobook. Her writing on photography has been published in Aperture, FOAM, Ojo de Pez and Lay Flat, among other publications. In 2011, she co-founded the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. She currently teaches a graduate course on photobooks at the Yale University School of Art.

Alessandra Mauro
Alessandra Mauro was born in Rome, Italy. A journalist, she graduated in Literature and History, and is Editorial Director of Contrasto Publishing House (Rome) and Artistic Director of Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia (Milan). She has conceived, curated and organised several exhibitions, books and catalogues. She is Photography Consultant at the Department of Contemporary Art of the Vatican Museums and a teacher of History of Photography at the University of Rome – Roma 3. In 2014, she edited Photoshow. Landmark exhibitions that defined the history of photography, a book on the history of photography from 1839 that addresses the most relevant exhibitions that have marked the significant changes in terms of the modes of fruition of the language of photography.

Laura Terré
Laura Terré was born in Vigo, Spain, in 1959 and has a doctorate in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona. Her studies have focused on the AFAL generation, which included Xavier Miserachs, with whom she held long theoretical exchanges while researching his archive. She has worked as a curator with most photographers of the AFAL generation, starting with her father, Richard Terré, of whose estate she is executor. Her most recent exhibition was Colita at La Pedrera, Barcelona, currently on show at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid.
She has also taught in secondary education, where she has contributed to the renewal of the teaching of the image by designing materials and programmes, and as a teacher trainer. Her experience as a teacher and researcher has informed her techniques and resources for communicating and incorporating the experiences of the public in her work as a curator.

Thomas Wiegand
Born in 1960, he studied photo engineering in Cologne (1979–83) and gained a doctorate in Art History in Kassel (1988–93). He lives in Kassel where he works as a freelance photographer and author on behalf of the region’s State Office for Monument Preservation. He is a specialist in the history of photography, in particular photobooks, and is the co-founder of the Kassel Fotobookfestival. Recent publications include Denkmaltopographie Stadt Kassel II (2005), Jenseits des Höhgrabens (2006), Nach: (2007) and Deutschland im Fotobuch (2011), as well as contributing to Eyes on Paris (2011), Autopsie 1 (2011), Autopsie 2 (2014) and Eyes Wide Open! 100 Years of Leica Photography (2014). His book Denkmaltopographie Stadt Kassel IV is forthcoming and future publications include Fotobücher der DDR.

Main sponsor of the activities:
Estrella Damm
Miserachs Barcelona

Programme

FRIDAY 20, FROM 6 TO 9 pm AND SATURDAY 21, FROM 11 am TO 2 pm AND 4 TO 8 pm 2015
Venue: Meier Auditorium

Friday, 20
6 pm Horacio Fernández: Miserachs: Barcelona, blanc i negre

6.45 pm Thomas Wiegand: Cities Photobooks Black and White

7.30 pm Alessandra Mauro: Photos on Display: The Photographic Exhibition as a Kinetic and Emotional Mechanism

Saturday, 21


11 am Lesley Martin: Remastering the Photobook

11.45 amFrom the Book to the Wall. Roundtable discussion with the participation of Horacio Fernández, Joan Fontcuberta, Manolo Laguillo and Laura Terré

Public Programmes
macba [at] macba [dot] cat
Tel: 93 481 33 68

Exhibition