La Rambla In/Out Barcelona

LA RAMBLA, a joint project that has emerged from the shared concerns of two highly acclaimed contemporary photographers, the Catalan Jordi Bernado (Lleida, 1966) and the Italian Massimo Vitali (Como, 1944), sets out to portray present-day Barcelona by way of one of its most emblematic public spaces, La Rambla. Each photographer, faithful to his own visual poetics, presents his personal vision of La Rambla: taken together, the photos show us two faces, two profiles, which are no less than two ways of looking and seeing. Bernado probes the interiors of buildings on La Rambla in contained, pared-down images of hidden or little-known spaces and other, more familiar spaces that strike us here as strange, ambiguous, almost grotesque. For his part, Vitali captures the more cosmopolitan, public face of La Rambla, the popular international thoroughfare, in panoramas of crowds in the urban space as a scenario of mass tourism. By way of the specificity of the Barcelona Rambla, this photographic chronicle proposes a critical reflection on architecture, urbanism and the transformation of the contemporary city in the new global era.