Joaquín Tusquets de Cabirol
Industrial chemist by profession. Photographer by lifelong commitment. His pictures of the port of Barcelona, the Catalan coast and the country inland belong to the middle decades of the twentieth century.
A Barcelona industrial chemist who photographed in parallel with his working life. He kept at it for decades — through the postwar years, the long fifties, the changing city — without showing the pictures or seeking to. Most of that work was unseen until 2020, when a box of his negatives surfaced and was deposited at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona.
Origins
Born in Barcelona in 1904. He trained as a chemist and practised the profession. Other parts of his life remain to be researched.
The photography
Tusquets de Cabirol photographed steadily outside the professional circuit. The images that survive are the work of someone formally educated in the medium — alert to composition, attentive to Mediterranean light, capable of sustaining a personal project across decades without any external pressure to deliver.
Subjects
Three subjects hold the work together. The first, and the largest, is the port of Barcelona: dockworkers, ships, infrastructure, and the daily life of the quay in the central decades of the century. The second is the Catalan coast — landscape, and the fishing trades along it. The third is the interior of Catalonia, which completes a kind of visual geography of the region.
Rediscovery
He died in Barcelona in 1979. A substantial part of his work stayed in the family for forty years. In 2020 a box of negatives resurfaced. The materials were placed at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona, which in 2021 mounted his first public exhibition, Imágenes encontradas. La Barcelona marítima de posguerra. El fondo Joaquín Tusquets de Cabirol ("Found Images. Maritime Barcelona in the Postwar Years").
In 2026, Fundación MAPFRE presents La forma elocuente ("The Eloquent Form") at KBr Barcelona Photo Center, in collaboration with Fundación Photographic Social Vision — the first substantial retrospective. His arrival into the canon of twentieth-century Catalan photography is part of a broader pattern: non-professional bodies of work, made outside the official circuits, returning to public view.