Conceived expressly for the rooms facing the Rambla, this project is a kind of symphony of collaborations in which Tanit Plana explores adolescence and its sociocultural practices.

It features 84 portraits of teenagers from different social classes and backgrounds who present themselves to the photographer’s camera in dramatic urban environments, borderlands where the city takes on a ghostly look.

La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona 2020.
MACBA collection.

puber
curated by Valentín Roma

In order to grasp the operations activated by these photographs, it is important to recognise – even if dimly – the divide that separates us (beginning with the very way in which we distinguish between us and them here), the intervals that open up and the fears that lie in wait; to look, to recognise. Along this journey, one that also involves allowing ourselves to be touched by images that are not visible, reservations and delays of every kind may undoubtedly arise. There is something oracular about the compendium of gazes with which they challenge us; these photographs have been taken so that unlearning may be uttered. That is to say, the possibility of calling into question everything we take for granted concerning this shaky moment of the self resulting from recognising the legacies received, as well as deciding what to do with them, and the collective confrontation with the disordered state of the world today.

In response to constant distraction as a means of control, the space for encounter offered by these photographs makes other, less predictable, visions possible. Their calm stillness and seeming lack of action enables us to recognise that undefined flow of images that beats in every detail; an orchestration of the seen and the inherited combined that is here visibly heightened, moreover, in the photographic syntax thanks to the sophisticated use of sources of light. In these photographs, a flash going off not only operates as a focus of attention but also as an instrument of alteration. This invisible bolt of lightning has the effect of simultaneously illuminating and darkening the scene; in full daylight or at dusk, it makes the silhouettes stand out, sculpting shadows, tracing a kind of threshold between the bodies and the context around them.

The Heartbeat of Images
Brief notes on Puber
by Marta Dahó (fragment)
La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona 2020

collection of 84 images