Photographs of the Port of Barcelona
The port is the place the camera keeps returning to. To the Tinglados sheds with their modernista arcades, to the sailing vessels at their moorings, to the silhouette of the Columbus Monument seen between the rigging.
The port Tusquets photographed was the port of a postwar city. The pictures don't make a point of that condition, but they record it in passing: in the uniforms, in the numbered cranes, in the way the small commercial sailing vessel keeps sharing the dock with the ocean liner. A great deal of Spanish documentary photography in those years was non-professional and very good. It worked outside the commercial system, and that distance is part of what the pictures are.
The trades come back into the frame again and again. The boatman, the sailor, the dockworker, the unnamed onlooker — passing figures the camera isolates without ceremony. The painters at the quay, who turn up in several series, are a separate case. They double the act of looking: the photographer photographing the painter who is, in turn, painting the port that the photographer has spent years photographing.
Vessels run all the way through the work. Coastal sailing ships and balandras, big merchant ships, the ocean liners that called at Barcelona through the fifties and sixties. The rigging keeps acting as a compositional filter. A bowsprit frames the Columbus Monument. Shrouds cut the sky into geometry. A white hull doubles itself in the dark water of the dock.
The negatives behind these pictures resurfaced in 2020 and were placed at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona, which in 2021 presented the photographer's first public exhibition, Imágenes encontradas. La Barcelona marítima de posguerra. In 2026, a wider selection forms part of Joaquín Tusquets de Cabirol. La forma elocuente at KBr Barcelona Photo Center (Fundación MAPFRE), with Fundación Photographic Social Vision. For research or reproduction enquiries, please write to the archive.