The first photograph taken in Barcelona -and, in fact, in the entire Iberian Peninsula- was taken on November 10, 1839 from a terrace in Pla de Palau. Its author was Ramón Alabern i Moles and the shooting took place during a festive act, open to all citizens and enlivened by a military music band that the Royal Academy of Natural Sciences and Arts had organized as a public demonstration of the operation of a Daguerre camera. . The image obtained was raffled to cover the purchase of the device and its whereabouts have never been known, but it did show the Xifré house, which had just been built, and the renovated Palau de la Llotja de Mar. That is, in the heart of bourgeois Barcelona, the most modern city of the moment.
“The choice of the place was not accidental”, points out the historian and student of photography from the Pompeu Fabra University Núria F. Rius, curator of the new exhibition at the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona that through one hundred period originals, most never exhibited, shows the crucial role that the new medium had in shaping the imaginary of Barcelona in the 19th century. Far from acting as a simple mirror of reality, photography has an impact on it, "providing a visual entity to discourses and ideas about Barcelona that would end up being imposed thanks, in part, to the circulation and distribution of images", defends the curator .
The city before the camera. Urban Imaginaries in the 19th Century, the title of the exhibition that can be visited until October 23, is a journey through time that allows us to follow the evolution of a Barcelona in full urban, social and political transformation, which is experiencing the demolition of its walls that constricted it and degraded its living conditions (from the 33,000 inhabitants that the city had in 1717 it had gone to 164,000 in 1854), the rapid process of industrialization, the appearance of the Estación de Francia or the Mercat del Born, the construction of the Eixample, almost twenty times larger than the old city, or the Universal Exhibition of 1888, a moment in which an enormous production of images took place.
Photographers of the time such as Antonio Esplugas then focused their cameras on two of the most popular attractions of the time, the building of the Columbus Monument -which during the construction process was the subject of numerous ridicules by the press, especially the satirical magazine L 'Esquetlla de la Torratxa, or the Captive Balloon which, located outside the Parc de la Ciutadella enclosure, offered the possibility of observing Barcelona from the sky. The one that was in the process of change and the one that ceased to exist a long time ago.
