Let's focus the camera: from the First World War to the Civil War, coinciding with the emergence of photography, Sabadell was the second city of Catalonia.
This is the click: in the French War there were fifty Catalan towns larger than Sabadell, and a century later only Barcelona surpassed it in number of inhabitants.
This emergence had its wild point – in 1873 the City Council compared the growth of the city with “those towns in the United States built on virgin soil, torn by modern civilization from the dominion of the Indians” – and had its photographic capture, now claimed by the Museum of Art and the Museum of History of Sabadell in the exhibition Objectiu Sabadell. History of photography 1860-1936.
From the image that Desiré Corbin took of the Salut bridge in 1863 – the bridge and photography paid for by the Provincial Council with contingencies – to the unexpected Anita Figueras, a teenager who in the 1920s photographed scenes worthy of the most disturbing German expressionism.
Between Desiré and Anita, almost a century of reality and photographed beauty of a city of factories that did not see itself as exactly beautiful. Local satirical magazines laughed at the first extensive urban photographic report in 1881, but that's what's interesting. Sabadell did not have the thick forests of Olot, but it had a unique heterodox human thickness: it mixed the most pious – liberalism is a sin – with a very powerful tribe of spiritualists, Esperantists, Protestants or theosophists.
Photographers and photography of a machine society that was expanding at American speed and that grew with plates and reels.
Professional and amateur photographers, poor and millionaires, men and women, all marked by the shadow of chimneys. Industrial images, hiking, family, sports or commercial postcards that give off that air of little church and a lot of heterodoxy.
The portrait is exhaustive and “everyone in the audience is hooked by something different,” says David González Ruiz, doctor in Art History, archivist and curator of the exhibition and its book-catalogue.
Photographs that engage in pleasure or pain, near and far. The sunken church of Sant Fèlix during the Tragic Week in 1909 photographed by Francesc Casañas. The battleship Maine sunk in 1898 in the port of Havana captured by the recruit Miquel Renom. Or the scenes of the Annual disaster in 1921 taken by fellow recruit Jaume Miró.
The exhibition reveals the role of women – there is the unclassifiable Anita Figueras or the impeccable Maria Codina photographing football around 1919 –, amateur or professional women. A surprising photograph never before revealed.
