Ignasi Marroyo

Ignasi Marroyo (Barcelona 1928 – Rubí, 2017) is a significant figure in the panorama of 1960s humanist photography in Catalonia. Throughout his career, Marroyo carried out graphic reportage commissions and was among the founders of photographic collectives, such as “El Mussol” within the Agrupación Fotográfica de Catalunya (1960) and “El Gra” (1966), at the Centro Excursionista de Rubí.

 

The present selection showcases a little-known part of Marroyo’s oeuvre. Since the consolidation of his photographic practice in the early 1960s, the photographer created more than eighty albums with the aim of classifying and editing material coming out his assignments and personal projects. Despite the fact that he never presented in public any of these albums, whose format he regarded as belonging to the intimate and thus more informal realm of the family album, over the decades, he regularly updated them, by adding new sequence and page-layout versions.

 

Through their stratigraphy of various periods, perspectives and technologies, the albums are the culmination of the practice of a visual documentarian who did not limit himself to being the maker of his images, but explored instead, perhaps more than any other author of his generation, his potential role as editor of his images and custodian of his photographic archive. Marroyo incessantly experimented with narrative sequencing and page-layout, and invented a rigorous classification system for his archive. Arranged into categories according to various themes which are inscribed in the social landscape and customs of his times, the albums express his credo. Even though he never stopped looking for the perfect shot, he envisioned it primarily as part of a "collection", that is, a broader visual narrative unfolding onto the double page. His vision finds there the terrain for exercise, affirming, over the years, its alignment with the official discourse of the humanist photography of his generation.

 

At a more conceptual level, the albums can be interpreted as an "atlas" of the author's universe in a Warburgian sense of the sense, or rather in a sense closer to Gerhard Richter — although, Marroyo never got to know even remotely any of them. They forge an autonomous visual ecosystem in which coexistence, contaminations, and migrations of images voluntarily or involuntarily take place, next to an unbiased appropriation of resources for the album collage, ranging from digital copies to photocopies. Marroyo stands out for his obsession with “archival order"; he never loses sight of the relevance his images may hold as a legacy for future generations. His albums are inseparable from his biography and an inexhaustible source of documentation encompassing an era.

 

This exhibition showcases single pages from the albums Braus II (1963-2014) and Mercats (1962-1977). The three of them are dated in the first era of edition of these albums, the early 1960s. Unlike the author’s most well-known images that were authorised by himself to be included in later solo and group retrospective exhibitions and which have are more focused on individual human characters and their customs, the pages on display here are occupied by cinemascope frames that provide a more topographic and iconoclastic view of the urban landscape of the time and its crowds. Amidst the hustle and bustle of the Catalan postwar city of Barcelona, a young, authentic, and ambitious gaze can be seen in the making.

-Natasha Christia-