Tony Catany (1942-2013) was born in the Mallorcan town of Llucmajor, in a house on Calle del Purgatori that adjoins that of the parish priest Tomàs Montserrat (1873-1944), a real figure who went to say mass on the beach on Sundays from S'Arenal, taught children in openwork wood, embalmed animals, had his own radio and even recorded a stone disc with the voices of his parents praying the rosary. But above all he was crazy about photography. He portrayed landscapes and popular festivals, and made the whole town parade through the outdoor set that he had set up in the patio of his house; always the same framing, the same decorations, the same time and the same day of the week, after Sunday mass...
Catany did not know Montserrat. He was two years old when the chaplain died. But it was he who, many years after becoming familiar with photography through the facsimiles of a correspondence course he received at home, when it had already achieved wide international recognition, recovered 150 glass plates and published the book Tomàs Monserrat . Portrait painter of a town. “There was an astral conjunction between them,” says Toni Garau, executor of the Catany legacy together with the poet Miquel Bezares and director of the Toni Catany International Photography Center, a museum designed by Josep Lluís Mateo that annexes both houses and merges into “a symbolic embrace” through the access patio.
Catany, one of the great authors of contemporary photography, settled in Barcelona in 1960 ("a Catalan from Mallorca", as Espriu defined it), traveled the world in search of the Mediterranean and turned the experience of the trip into food for his own creation. But when death took him by surprise ten years ago, his great dream was to return to Llucmajor permanently to start a photography center in which to deposit his legacy after ignoring the insistent siren songs that came from France. . Most of the personal archive of 165,000 negatives and 15,000 copies on paper, the more than 5,000 books that made up his library, his collection of photographs of more than 300 authors..., continue in his Barcelona studio in Nou de la Rambla, pending of the move, although the International Center of Photography that bears his name is already a splendid reality (it opened in March) and life circulates through its 1,400 square meters.
The project, the result of a public-private agreement, had been trapped since 2008 in bureaucratic gibberish plagued by setbacks and disappointments. “The fate of the files is a very serious problem that affects photographers of that entire generation. Colita sold a part to the Arxiu Nacional and another to the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona; Joan Colom left it at the MNAC and Paco Gómez at Foto Colectania. At the Fundació Miró they have that of Joaquim Gomis and that of Xavier Miserachs is in the Macba... Of all of them, we are the only ones that have achieved it", recalls Garau, who for the opening of the center, the only one of its kind in Spain , has established a dialogue between the work of Catany and that of the British Michael Kenna. "It's like the starting shot for the many things that have to happen here, not a culmination at all." The next step, to incorporate the Nou de la Rambla studio, which forms a whole with the Mallorcan center.
The Fundació Toni Catany found its best accomplice in the architect Josep Lluís Mateo, who behind what looks like another house in Llucmajor, with its old marés façade, hides a functional and super contemporary museum. “I didn't want to make an iconic work, on the contrary, I wanted it to go unnoticed, but once inside you would find yourself in another world”, points out the architect, who has carried out almost archaeologist work to preserve some ruins from the past. Among them, the set of the patio where he made his portraits.
