Barcelona Grafica

America Sanchez

496 pages, parution le 13/12/2001

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Résumé

In producing this book, America Sanchez has photographed and arranged some 1,825 examples of Barcelona urban graphic art: shop signs, door numbers, vignettes, allegories, emblems and pictograms which illustrate the uses of the city and make them legible. In so doing, Sanchez has rescued from anonymity a multitudinous cast of spontaneous graphic artists: sign-writers, painters, engravers, carvers, smiths, stained-glass workers. With this, he has inaugurated a new field of study of everyday life, the main themes of which Norberto Chaves discusses in his introductory remarks to the work. A superficial gaze will find nothing here but a collection of curiosities, products of popular inventiveness. The more attentive gaze, however, will discover a genuine graphic treasure. With this book, America Sanchez makes a cultural contribution as important, if not more so, as his estimable work as a graphic designer. As a result, Barcelona can see itself in the mirror of its anonymous graphic art and thereby recoup another aspect of its enormously rich heritage.

Author's note

The creation and publication of this book, realized between 1998 and 2000, brings to an end an extended period of observation and recording of various facets of graphic art I began discovering in the early 1970s. These include popular, folk, anonymous and spontaneous graphics, all of which awakened an enormous interest in me and really helped to enrich my visual culture as a photographer-designer.

With the rigor of a doctoral thesis on imagery, plus a pedagogical intent, I offer the reader a tour of the streets of Barcelona and attempt to draw his or her attention to the great variety of graphic details to be found on the facades making up its urban landscape.

There are almost two thousand images, representing all the barrios of Barcelona, and classified in some 150 variations on seventeen major themes: the human figure, flora, fauna, figurative and abstract iconography, shields, plaques, tiles, murals, signs, captions, monograms, numbers, ornaments, ironwork. Two hundred and thirty pages and four gatefolds, arbitrarily arranged, the aim of which is to awaken the curiosity of, and to surprise, the "pedestrian". <<p> The book is open to a wide range of readings, as a volume of photos, a graphic document of the city's heritage, or as a reference manual of graphic solutions for designers, typographers, architects and interior designers. It is also a meditation on the industrial, commercial and institutional fabric of different eras of the city.

Contents

Index
Introduction
Author's note
Photographs
Index of streets
Bibliography
Biography

Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Gustavo Gili (GG)
Auteur(s)	America Sanchez
Parution	13/12/2001
Nb. de pages	496
Format	19,5 x 26,8
Couverture	Relié
Poids	1859g
Intérieur	Quadri
EAN13	9788425218507