It has been 25 years since Xavier Miserachs died, one of the most important photographers the country has produced. I admired him. Heir to the realist path initiated by Català-Roca, he was a colleague of Colita, Maspons and Pomés. As a documentarian, he portrayed the African lakes, Nordic Europe, Egypt, Cuba, Thailand, Russia. His most decisive photographic work is the one that describes the Catalonia of his time. He defended the need to link photography to social or natural reality, but he did so very tenderly and with fine irony.
Barcelona in black and white is the best possible post-war document. Francoism, the arrival of the Andalusians, the desire to live and have a good time that emerged from the official blackness. Costa Brava show reflects with delicious humor the sudden clash of tourism and bikinis in the suddenly urbanized rural and marine landscape. Realistic, affectionate and funny, he did not ignore the demands of modern aesthetics: his human or natural landscapes can be admired as a social document and at the same time as abstract compositions.
He lived in Esclanyà, a stone’s throw from Palafrugell. When he settled there, he was already a well-known artist. He came from the bustling Barcelona of the 1960s, but he integrated himself so much into local life that he was considered a passionate, ironic and kind militant of Empordà civility (he explains this in his memoirs: Contact sheets, Ed. 62). He made himself loved: he was a tender, ironic, kind man. In Palafrugell he educated his two daughters, Mar and Arena, made many friends there, played tennis, opened bars and businesses there with his friend Oriol Regàs (without whom Barcelona’s gauche divine would not have existed ).
Sensational testimony to his Empordà militancy is the photographic part of L’Empordà, a wonderful book, where he portrayed the country’s landscapes and people. I was lucky enough to write the text of this book and set the title. I borrowed it from Ramon Llull, who in the 13th century wrote the story of a man, Fèlix, who goes around the world marveling at the good and evil he sees. Miserachs did the same. He knew how to discover ugliness in opulence, the ridiculous in beauty and the sublime in the mud.
