It's been 25 years since Xavier Miserachs died, one of the most important photographers the country has produced. He admired it. Heir to the royalist path initiated by Català-Roca, he was a classmate of the generation of Colita, Maspons and Pomés. As a documentarian, he portrayed the African lakes, Nordic Europe, Egypt, Cuba, Thailand, Russia. But his most important photographic work is the one that describes the Catalonia of his time. He defended the need to link photography to social or natural reality, but he did so with great tenderness and fine irony.
Barcelona en blanc i negre is the best possible document of the postwar period. The Franco regime, the arrival of the Andalusians in the big city, the desire to live and have a good time of the people emerging from the official blackness. Costa Brava show reflects with delicious humor the sudden clash of tourism and bikinis in a suddenly urbanized rural and marine landscape. Realistic, affectionate and funny, he did not ignore the demands of modern aesthetics: his human or natural landscapes can be admired as a social document and, at the same time, as abstract compositions.
He lived in Esclanyà, two steps from Palafrugell. When he settled down, he was already a well-known artist. He came from the bustling Barcelona of the sixties, but he was so integrated into local life that he was considered a passionate, ironic and kind militant of the Empordà civility (he explains it in his memoirs: Fulls de contacte, Ed. 62). .
He made himself loved: he was a tender, ironic, extremely kind man. In Palafrugell he educated his two daughters, Mar and Arena, made many friends, played tennis, opened bars and businesses with his friend Oriol Regàs (without whom the Barcelona gauche divine would not have existed). A sensational witness to his Empordà militancy is the photographic part of L'Empordà, llibre de meravelles, in which he portrayed the landscapes and people of the country. I was lucky enough to write the text of this book and fix the title. I borrowed it from Ramon Llull, who in the 13th century wrote the story of a man, Fèlix, who goes around the world marveling at the good and evil he sees. Miserachs did the same. He knew how to discover grace in misery, ugliness in opulence, ridicule in beauty, and the sublime in the mud.
