Is this your favorite of all your photos?
Yes! I shot it on my 60th birthday.
What do we see there?
An old, dignified guanaco, the dying Christ of Good Friday, blind, “eyes gnawed by the sun and nights”, Casaldàliga told me.
The Catalan bishop in the Amazon?
My friend, he was sending me his texts for my photos – I was lucky!
How many years have you spent taking pictures?
fifty years From the first in 1969, in the magazine Grama, from Santa Coloma de Gramenet, until recently.
What were you doing in Santa Coloma?
I arrived from Tarifa in 1964, driven by hunger. Emigrant, I worked on the road to Tibidabo.
And where does this thing about taking pictures come from?
In Tarifa, as a child, I took a box of matches and drilled a square in it…
To look through it?
He saw a ship stranded on the beach, took a shot and… “bang!”
Imaginary photo.
The best, in the wind friend of hunger.
Tell me another imaginary photo.
Antonio Machado walks Leonor, his young wife, already very ill, in a wooden cart made by the poet…
Where are?
Ribera del Duero, evening, golden breeze in the poplars, he recites his verses to her…
I’m looking at this picture, master.
It contains love, pain and beauty, everything!
Are you a photojournalist or a poet?
You have to be a person first; later, poet. The good photo, no matter how raw, is the one that hides some poetry.
Who instructed him as a photographer?
Truffaut with The 400 hits, Buñuel with The Forgotten and especially Vittorio De Sica with Lladre de bicicletas.
Is that enough?
They were my university. And immigration to Santa Coloma: I photographed it since the 60s, children playing in puddles…
How we have improved!
If I ask you: what comes first, bread or freedom?
Freedom.
“The bread!”, we answer those who have suffered hunger. In the 70s I dreamed that people of many races would walk along the banks of a clean Besòs river with fish…
His dream has come true.
I give thanks I’m lucky A woman loved me very much, we have a house: we are kings! I also had a son die and I filled the seas with tears.
I lament.
My wife was the strong one. She let me be free and happy with my photos. I retired and decided to leave the camera at home…
And well?
I was walking around Santa Coloma and I saw a very black man cradling a very white baby on a bench… and the camera at home! I never went out without my camera again.
I see her here, yes.
Impossible to get used to, it’s part of me.
What is photography for?
I did not intend to change the world with my photos, only to twin it. Photography can stir consciences.
An example.
That migrant boy dead on a beach. That child languishing in hunger next to a vulture…
Doesn’t it seem ethically abusive?
At a funeral, in the Santa Coloma cemetery, the relatives opened the coffins of the dead daughters. “Clack”. I took pictures. I sent the reel… I regretted it.
Were those photos published?
No: I called on time. They brought nothing but pain. But those on the beach and the vulture raise awareness: they do contribute.
Which photographer do you admire?
Sebastião Salgado. It unites suffering and beauty: in a photo of refugees a baby and a mother look at each other with love in the midst of chaos…
Mothers, always.
Total love To the limit of madness.
Who are you thinking about?
Run over, my friend Antonio Montferré died. We were from FOC, very good friends, with Pasqual Maragall. I had pictures of him and sent them to his family…
A way to keep it alive.
But one day his sister told me not to send any more pictures.
And this?
They disappeared from the drawer where they were kept. And they discovered that the mother was tearing them apart and swallowing the pieces. A way to have your child inside…
How many stories…
I remember an old farmer in South America who said hello every morning. The day I said goodbye, he entered his tin hut, took out two eggs: “Take care!”, he told me, crying. He gave them to me, I had nothing.
