Arcadia Spain
Photography Class in Sabadell
Date
February 9, 2019
The Photography class students went last weekend to Sabadell, one of the largest suburban towns in Barcelona. A city of over 200,000 inhabitants, Sabadell was known in the past as the “Catalan Manchester” due to the proliferation of textile factories during the Catalan Industrial revolution of the 19th c.
Students had a few hours to explore their surroundings and take photographs to create a full photo-‐reportage. The goal of this study is to put together a document of the “other Barcelona”, a non-‐touristic location, a “non-‐place”, as photographer Luigi Ghirri would describe it. Students needed to put together a narrative in which every photo is part of a sequence that tells a story about the place. This field study helps young photographers change their ordinary notion of urban landscape and get inspired by the unexpected and interesting contrasts of this specific location.
The topics of Nature, City and Man – Altered Landscape have been discussed in class, as well as the use of Color in photography. The work of photographers such as Tanya Ahmed, Edward Burtynsky or Anita Tejlgaard, among many others reviewed in class, serves as inspiration. But it is, in particular, the work of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri that becomes essential to understand this exercise.
Luigi Ghirri is one of the most important photographers of the 20th c. and a pioneer in the use of color photography in the 1970s. With an unpretentious and sometimes melancholic style, he tried to explain the relationship of the individual with his environment. He used photography to narrate places as realities all to be discovered, far beyond the predictable patterns of passive viewers, and to change the ordinary notion of landscape.
Luigi Ghirri focuses on urban landscapes in the periphery of cities, capturing the landscape of the suburbs, its architecture and its relationship to nature. In this context, students will be asked to look for contrasts in their shots: beautiful buildings versus ugly ones, old versus new, nature versus man-‐made, public spaces invaded by the media versus ephemeral everyday objects.
Trying to answer the questions: what is real?; what is our real experience of things? students are removed from scenes that have been photographed thousands of times and taken to a location where they can look around with fresh eyes and have a brand new urban experience.