There is nothing more intresting than the landscape of the human face

 

Sant Roc, El Guinardó, Santa Coloma, Bon Pastor, Cornellà, El Raval, La Mina. A kiosk vendor, a shop assistant, a waitress, a hairdresser, a homeless man, children playing in the streets, retired men at a domino club, the romani people, karatekas training by the river… Is it really necessary to go far away to find interesting people? Barcelona is full of radically different districts in which, obviously, we will find great cultural, ethnic and socio-economic diversity. In the context of Jordi Oliver’s documentary photography workshops, En los barrios que os sobraban, taken in 2016 and 2017, I have put together a tiny mosaic of street portraits of Barcelona residents (both locals and immigrants), mostly in the outskirts of the city, almost always forgotten about. The goal was to photograph during their everyday life people with whom maybe, in different circumstances, without having the camera as an excuse, we would not have stopped to talk to. Personally, that is what attracts me the most about documentary photography: finding beauty where others do not see it and listening to life stories so that I can later tell them visually. If an image can speak to us without words, the image of a human face can convey all the more. Authenticity lives in simple things.

* Everyone in this project was photographed with their consent.