The county archive Comarcal de l’Anoia (ACAN) was founded in 1986, when it also joined the network of archives of the regional government of Catalonia - Red de Archivos de la Generalitat de Catalunya. For the past thirty years, ACAN has overseen the different photography collections that besides being witnesses to history also have artistic value in their own right. The archive has more than 300,000 pictures dating from the end of the 19 th century down to the present day.
ACAN’s aim with the Faces exhibition is to use public spaces to showcase not only its diversity of authors-photographers, but also the historical legacy of a way of appreciating and addressing photography as both an art form and a way of recording an era.
Since the early 20 th century, Igualada has been a breeding-ground for master photographers, and this is precisely what we would like to salute. The photographs by José Castelltort, Ramón Godó, Francisco Javier Andrés, Ignacio Castelltort, José Bisbal, Juan Domingo Bisbal, Antonio Roset and many others enable us to hold exhibitions as explorations that help us to live out stories from past times, while at the same time discovering the photographic techniques used before the advent of the digital age.
As Berenice Abbott affirms “Photography helps people to see" and at ACAN we would like to show you the photographer’s perspective reflected in the faces of their subjects.