The Domestic Camera. Amateur Photography in Catalunya

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Image courtesy of Metalocus

Personal photographs, the fruit of an occasional hobby or amateur dedication, are not merely images of an individual and his or her environment. From the concrete and particular, they are collective images that transcend the individual and nominal to become documents that provide us with information on the visual and photographic culture of a specific society, in relation to collective phenomena of their time.

From the end of the 19th century until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, an amateur and popular photographic culture was born and developed strongly in Catalunya. It took place at the same pace as in other foreign countries and was the first time in history that individuals could represent themselves without relying on artistic or technical knowledge.

This exhibition reviews the phenomenon of amateur photography in this period, focusing on a selection of recurrent and common themes and visual motifs that allow us to understand who practiced photography as a hobby and how the language of amateur and popular photography was constituted at the beginning of the 20th century.

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