Joan Guerrero, one of the country’s great social photographers, has died at the age of 84. His name has always been linked to Santa Coloma de Gramenet, the city where he settled at the age of twenty. “I only know how to take photos in Santa Coloma, I see that everything is there,” he confessed last summer to La Contra de La Vanguardia.
He arrived there 60 years ago and his parents and son are buried there. She left his native Tarifa behind and embarked on a new adventure in Catalonia. In order to pay for the trip, he had to sell his first camera, a Voigtländer, with which he began his first steps in the profession, playing at framing his friends with a box of matches on the beach.
Guerrero was a photojournalist for 50 years and did photographic reports in Ecuador, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Brazil, where he cooperated with the religious Pere Casaldàliga.
Throughout his career he worked with various media outlets, such as El Magazine de La Vanguardia, El Periódico, Diari de Barcelona, ??El País and El Observador, although his first collaboration was in 1969 with Grama magazine. From here, her career took an upward path thanks to the social commitment that her photographs acquired.
There are many recognitions received throughout his career, among which the gold medal for artistic merit from the Barcelona City Council, in 2009, and the Singladura award from Òmnium Cultural, in 2018, stand out.
Last summer, the Escola Industrial de Barcelona inaugurated a collective outdoor exhibition organized by the association Catalunya Mirades Solidàries (CMS) as a tribute to Guerrero.
