Craigie Horsfield belongs to a generation of artists who, in the 1980s, promoted the ‘new photographic objectivity’ and the idea of photographs as tableaux. His series The City of the People was produced in post-Olympic Barcelona during the 1990s. Curated by Manuel J. Borja-Villel and Jean-François Chevrier for an impressive exhibition at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, it featured a series of around fifty portraits of people from the city. Some of these portraits are now part of the MACBA Collection. For the photographer, the Barcelona series marked a new way of working articulated around projects of social collaboration. To select his subjects, Horsfield worked with a team of anthropologists, economists and architects who contributed their vision of the diverse social groups in the city. Although the project incorporated different urban areas, special attention was paid to Nou Barris, a district comprising the neighbourhoods of Ciutat Meridiana, Vallbona and Torre Baró. During the working process, people shared their experiences and their views on their neighbourhoods and the city. Made in strict black and white and with a pronounced frontality, Horsfield presented the photographs in large formats that prompted a direct confrontation with the viewer, almost like a frieze of portraits of great visual power and, above all, a live portrait of the city and its human constellations. As the curators of the exhibition remarked: ‘Through images of places and the people of Barcelona, Horsfield was trying to describe the human relationships that make up the city, so the viewer might recognise its basic structure. For Horsfield, photography must bear some responsibility in the evolution of our perception and awareness of the world and its transformation.’