Barcelona, Black and White (Catalan: Barcelona, blanc i negre) by Xavier Miserachs was made in Barcelona between 1962 and 1964 and published as a photobook in September 1964, tracing everyday street life as the city moved from postwar austerity toward rapid industrial and urban change.
From the start, Miserachs treats Barcelona less as architecture than as a social organism. Working at twenty-five and aligned with the "New Vanguard" (Nova Avantguarda), he documents developmentalist Spain under Franco: factories and construction sites alongside railway arrivals, peripheral neighborhoods shaped by migration, and early consumer culture and tourism set against visible poverty.
That attention to the human presence is matched by a visual language built on speed and proximity. Across 371 photographs, a monochrome palette and a wide range of grays are punctuated by dense blacks that frequently occupy large portions of the frame. Miserachs often moves in close, sometimes from low angles, letting multiple planes of activity coexist—faces, gestures, traffic, façades—within a single image. Lateral light can flatten figures into silhouettes, while purposeful blur registers the nervous motion of crowds and vehicles.
Shot on 35 mm negatives, the project depends on rapid framing and a high-volume working method (over 7,000 exposures distilled into the final edit). Influenced by William Klein’s Life is Good and Good for You in New York, he organizes the project as a "strictly photographic" narrative: images appear loosely disordered, yet accumulate into a readable argument, more like a film’s montage than a portfolio of isolated prints.
First issued by Aymà Editora in 1964, the book later became a reference point in institutional and scholarly discussions of Spanish photobooks, including Museo Reina Sofía’s survey Photobooks: Spain 1905–1977 (2014). A MACBA-led reedition with RM (2015) and the exhibition "Miserachs Barcelona" (2015–2016) reframed the work through murals and projections, while contemporary recognitions—such as the José Lázaro Galdiano Prize (2016) and selections at PhotoEspaña and Rencontres d’Arles—extended its visibility beyond Barcelona.
