Photographing heritage. The Palau Güell
I feel that I have still not realized how lucky I am to be able to photograph the most unique architecture in my city, the urban landscape that I have known since I was a child.
It seems to me that it does not make much sense for me to speak here about Antoni Gaudí, about the beauty and genius of his work, nor for me to repeat familiar clichés about photography and its incredible power to evoke memories and emotions.
I am a Barcelona photographer, this is my city. I have been raised here to be the gentleman with glasses and gray hair who now walks through its streets carrying a camera. I have strolled these streets thousands of times and I have contemplated their urban landscape, all its historical heritage and contemporary architecture without a hurry. I suppose always with that attitude of a flâneur willing to let himself be soaked to the bone by a fine and constant rain of powerful visual stimuli –in my case, I do admit it, by the city colors–.
The question when you are a photographer –much more if you happen to be an architectural photographer– is that there is a decisive moment in your education when you become aware that the daily relationship with your city environment prevents you from seeing it aesthetically and how much, if you don’t assimilate that evidence, you are lost for finding beauty in it.
All the landscape that surrounds you are nothing but shapes and colors that you surely may perceive but that you don't see until you receive this –let’s say …– enlightening epiphany and stop being blind to those wonders. From that moment on you are able to understand the world with your camera and, even more, to explain it from your unique point of view.
Always keeping that fascination of seeing the hidden order of the details in the city, its urban landscape and architecture is what has allowed me to invest all the necessary energy to dialogue with all the works of Antoni Gaudí that I have photographed –you can see them here–: the compact beauty of the Vicens House, the prodigality of color at Batlló House, the soft and corporeal light of the Gaudí Crypt, the perpetual spring of El Capricho and now, also, the Palau Güell.
No doubt you will easily find a very extensive and detailed bibliography on what this building means in the whole of Antoni Gaudí's work, I am sure. For me as a photographer it represents a fearless balance between a supposedly massive appearance in very warm hues that melts into a color explosion on the building top, a very intricate texturing exercise as complex as embroidering the photograph by hand and the opportunity to draw shapes in the air with completely uninhibited gestures.
But there is more, that is why I talked you about the evocative power of photographs: these, the ones that you can see on this post, were shot in the winter of 2016 and I have not published them until that of 2021, when they are finally available on social networks and I have had the right to do so.
In all these years when my pictures have remained invisible, I have remembered many times my beloved uncle Jordi: he was the one who made it possible and accompanied me to visit the Palau Güell when I was studying photography and the place was not yet open to the public. The first impression I had of this palace was with him, one of the people in my life who always encouraged me to be a photographer, who recommended me movies to see and books to read.
My uncle passed away a few years ago, he died after suffering from Alzheimer's disease and slowly fading … So, when I see this building I see him and when I finally publish these photographs I show him my deepest gratitude and respect.
Because this, my friends, is a labour of love.