La Chanca in Color (Spanish: La Chanca en color) by Carlos Pérez Siquier was made in the La Chanca neighborhood of Almería, Spain, mainly between 1960 and 1965, focusing on everyday life and the painted surfaces of a marginalized district. While official campaigns promoted a bright, tourist-facing Spain, Pérez Siquier turned his camera toward a peripheral neighborhood shaped by poverty, informal labor, and long-standing communities, including many residents of Roma descent.
That ethical stance is carried by a visual language that shifts between people and walls. Many photographs are tightly framed in a square format, compressing alleys, doorways, and interior planes into fields of color and geometry. Natural light, often the vertical glare of midday in Almería, sharpens contrasts and turns lime-washed paint into readable layers. Yellows, greens, and intense blues or indigo recur, sometimes behind children at play, sometimes presented as near-abstract surfaces.
Technique helped shape this turn. Pérez Siquier moved from 35mm street work to a medium format 6x6 camera, embracing a slower, more deliberate framing. He shot on color transparency film and described exposure as intuitive, relying on a "mental photometer" when meters struggled with blinding white surfaces. In recent decades, digitization and careful adjustment have also been used to recover colors that had shifted in the physical archive.
The color work was initially easy to misread in a culture that still treated black-and-white as the default art language, but later exhibitions and publications brought it forward. Its reception widened through international discussions of early color practice, including Pérez Siquier’s inclusion in the 2007 New York exhibition "Colour Before Color." Institutional validation followed through acquisitions (including works entering the Reina Sofía collection in 2009), major retrospectives (Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona in 2020 and Madrid in 2022), and career honors such as Spain's National Photography Award (2003) and the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts (2018).
