RAVAL — Joan Colom — Steidl 2006

For more than two years, Joan Colom spent his weekends photographing the streets of Barcelona's Raval, historically known as the Barrio Chino. Working among passers-by, sex workers and neighbourhood residents, he developed an unusually direct and instinctive approach to urban photography, recording the gestures and encounters of a community largely absent from official representations of the city.

Seeking to remain unnoticed, Colom often photographed without looking through the viewfinder, later determining the final composition in the darkroom. This working method produced images of remarkable immediacy: tightly cropped figures, fleeting exchanges and fragments of everyday street theatre. Rather than constructing a picturesque portrait of Barcelona, his photographs register the contradictions and vitality of life under Franco's dictatorship.

Published by Steidl in 2006, Raval revisits the body of work that established Colom as a central figure of postwar Spanish photography. With contributions by Pepe Font de Mora and Agnès Sire, the book places his photographs in the context of Barcelona's social history and the modern photographic language emerging in Spain during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Colom's work was recognised early by photographers and critics including Ramón Masats and Josep Maria Casademont.

What makes this Steidl edition particularly compelling is the way it invites a different reading of Colom’s celebrated Barcelona photographs. His earlier book Izas, rabizas y colipoterras, published in 1964 with texts by Camilo José Cela, presented a markedly selective vision of the streets, with prostitution occupying a central place in its literary and visual framing. Raval, by contrast, allows Colom’s broader documentary sensibility to emerge: the neighbourhood becomes a complex social environment, populated by ordinary residents as well as figures from its margins, rather than being reduced to a single subject. Steidl’s carefully considered reproduction gives the photographs room to breathe and makes the subtlety of Colom’s observation especially apparent. For DaRWIN, this shift in emphasis—and the quality of the printing—is precisely what makes the edition so rewarding.

Technical Sheet
Title: Raval
Artist / Author: Joan Colom
Texts: Pepe Font de Mora; Agnès Sire
Publisher: Steidl
Date: 2006 (12 June)
Edition: First edition; English edition
Medium / Materials: Hardcover photobook
Language: English
ISBN: 9783865213242
Condition: Mint