30.10.2019 - 08.03.2020

Caixaforum Barcelona. Camera and the city.

https://caixaforum.es/ca/barcelona/p/camera-i-ciutat-la-vida-urbana-en-la-fotografia-i-el-cinema_a581881

Camera and the city. Scenes of modernity was developed by La Caixa Banking Foundation in collaboration with  Centre Pompidou-Paris, curated by Florian Ebner, chief of photography of Paris’s Centre Pompidou,which will include the film FACELESS (2007) by Manu Luksch.

Artists include  Francis Alÿs, Diane Arbus, Luis Buñel, René Clair, Thomas Hirschhorn, Mikhail Kaufman, Helen Levitt, Liu Wei, Alexandr Ródchenko, Paola Yacoub  

The experience of the big city is part of the essential conditions of our modernity. The metropolis has acted as a social stage, a political battlefield, but also as a wild playground throughout the 20th century. This exhibition is about the Camera and the City, about photographers and filmmakers who recorded, staged, and dissected the city, thus writing different scenarios of both urban life and culture. These narratives are about the euphoria of the metropolis, as well as the solitude of modern society, conflict, war and reconciliation, protest, change, but also about selfaffirmation in the street. The stories range from the rise of the growing city to the melancholy of the shrinking city, to the encounter with others to the surveillance of citizens in the global village of our digital age.

This is the first time that major works from different departments of the Centre Pompidou –photographs, films, videos, and printed matter – are shown in dialogue with photographs and films from Spanish collections, in order to shed light on the way in which the camera –photography, cinema, and video – shaped the idea of urbanity.