Barcelona 1957 by Leopoldo Pomés was made across 1957 in Barcelona, after editor Carlos Barral at Seix Barral commissioned the then 25-year-old photographer to document the city for a photo-book focused on street life and social contrasts under Francoism.
Rather than offering the "showcase" Barcelona preferred by official taste—monuments, gardens, and a reassuring civic portrait—Pomés uses the commission to interrogate what daily life looked and felt like in an atmosphere often described as gloomy and gray. The work moves through the bourgeois Eixample and out toward the margins: the Raval, the port, and districts such as Verdum, remembered for unpaved streets. Taken across these neighborhoods, Barcelona 1957 maps the city’s social divides—between Civil War winners and losers—and the lack of freedom that shaped public life under the regime. Pomés’ own ambivalence—he said he loved the city while also hating it—threads through the project as a method of looking rather than a declared thesis.
The photographs foreground anonymous figures and the choreography of the street: nuns riding the metro, children carrying heavy oil jars, street sweepers, marines from the Sixth Fleet on the Ramblas. Las Ramblas becomes the city’s meeting place, where strangers cross paths and then move on. Pomés often treats bodies, clothing, and gestures as graphic elements, cropping to details, and relying on a soft scale of grays punctuated by deep shadows that compress the city’s air and distance.
Technically, the series reflects a self-taught, analog practice in which Pomés controlled the full darkroom cycle—developing, fixing, and printing. He printed with deep blacks and heavy shadows, adjusting exposure in the darkroom and sometimes introducing blur at the printing stage, along with burning, to shape the scene’s tone.
Reception initially turned on refusal: although Barral supported the results, the publisher’s board vetoed them for being too gloomy and for omitting landmarks, leaving the project largely unpublished for 55 years. Its later recovery—first shown in a 1997 retrospective and then presented definitively in 2012 by Fundació Foto Colectania and La Fábrica—repositioned it within Spanish urban photography, often cited as a "missing link" between Francesc Català-Roca’s 1954 Barcelona work and Xavier Miserachs’ 1964 Barcelona, Black and White.
