Humberto Rivas (Buenos Aires, 1937-Barcelona, 2009) was called the photographer of silence, for the simplicity and austerity of his portraits, almost always frontal, that showed people in all their rawness in an attempt to reveal what was hidden and capture its essence. Most of them were taken in Barcelona, the city where he arrived in 1976 fleeing the murky and violent situation in Argentina that would lead to the military coup, and where he became one of the great references of Barcelona photography. He died in 2009, 48 hours before the city was going to award him the Gold Medal for Artistic Merit. Now the City Council wanted to give it a final recognition by acquiring a collection of 23,193 negatives, plates and slides of different sizes, as well as contacts, six photomontage models and 200 original copies. The set, valued at 20,000 euros, has been deposited in the Barcelona Photographic Archive, which will guarantee its conservation and dissemination.
The acquisition, announced this Tuesday, also materializes the will of the family, who had always expressed their desire for the work to remain in Barcelona, the city where he spent half of his life. In addition to the portraits and characters from Catalonia, the collection is made up of still lifes, facades of decadent and lonely shops and empty urban landscapes, as well as preparatory notes for the classes he taught, clippings and personal documents, among which the correspondence with the photographer and designer América Sánchez, who was the one who persuaded him to settle in Barcelona.
Rivas, who began his artistic activity in his native land as a graphic designer and painter, was an author of great relevance to contemporary Catalan photography, to which he contributed his avant-garde perspective, helping to vindicate its artistic potential. He photographed "the essence of things regardless of their nature," and that included both people and animals, as well as empty urban spaces - anonymous hotel rooms, uninhabited houses, deserted avenues, closed doors and windows, abandoned facades on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. , Valencia, Barcelona or Amsterdam. In 2009, the City Council had already acquired its Traces project, consisting of the record of the vestiges that still remain among us from the Civil War.
Since his arrival in Barcelona, Humberto Rivas began to interact with the world of photography and its protagonists: Xavier Miserachs, Toni Catany, Joan Fontcuberta, Pere Formiguera, Manel Esclusa and other members of the generation of the seventies, for whom Rivas was a reference. Among the many portraits of him, those made of transvestite Violeta la Burra stand out, a charismatic character of the Barcelona nightlife, whom, exceptionally, he photographed repeatedly. He was also commissioned to portray great figures of culture and politics, such as Joan Miró, Josep Tarradellas, Frederica Montseny, Charlie Rivel, JV Foix, Salvador Espriu, Joan Brossa and Antoni Tàpies. "To take a good portrait is to defeat the war that takes place between the photographer and the model. We all want to show a certain image of ourselves, and I do not seek to photograph the character, but the person," he stated.
For Rivas, the photographs had to speak for themselves and his great fear was "that an image says nothing." Still alive, and on the occasion of the great exhibition that the MNAC dedicated to him in 2006, he donated fifty of the images on display to the Catalan museum. She experimented until the end and among her latest works are her Crucifixions: compositions of nine images in which she fragmented women in that position. Among her recognitions are the City of Barcelona Prize for Plastic Arts (1996) and the National Prize for Photography (1997).
