05. Reflect
Some photographs wait decades before revealing their full meaning. For the Barcelona based photographer Gregori Civera, it took thirty one years to return to the same building.

We invited Gregori to reflect on architecture through two moments in his practice: his first photographs of the D.A.T. (Dispensario Antituberculoso) in Barcelona, made in 1993 at the very beginning of his career, and his return to the site in 2024. Between these two bodies of work lies not only the evolution of a building, but also of a photographer's way of seeing.

All images courtesy of Gregori Civera.




Gregori Civera, D.A.T. 1993.
All photographs were commissioned by Antonio Pizza for a book about the D.A.T.



I just had to find the 31 year old negatives, which miraculously took my assistant about only 10 minutes.


Words by Gregori Civera

D.A.T. stands for Dispensario Antituberculoso, a health facility designed by the G.A.T.P.A.C. I first photographed it on October 13, 1993, the very day before turning 22 as pointed by the notes on the negatives. 

It’s a summer’s  day of 2024 and I‘m having a lunch with Jorge Ribalta, with whom I just had worked on group show he had curated at MACBA Barcelona called ‘An unknown city beneath the mist. New images of Barcelona’. The show consisted of 13 new production projects around the topic of the tittle that Jorge commissioned to 13 different artists: from international luminaries like Jeff Wall or Martha Rossler, to Spanish artists like Pedro G. Romero, Bleda y Rosa, Manolo Laguillo and myself. During the lunch Jorge asks me about what’s on my desk. I mention I had photographed the Dispensario all those years ago and that my immediate plan was to photoigraph it again. Being a photographer himself, Jorge had also photographed the Dispensario and we decide to join forces and propose  a two man show to Angels Barcelona Gallery. The Show will include the BW photographs I made in 1993, the ones made by Jorge between 2017 and 2020, also in BW, and the color ones I was about to produce. I just had to find the 31 year old negatives, a task that  miraculously took my assistant about just 10 minutes.




Gregori Civera, D.A.T. 2024.


Valuable negatives are never lost.


Valuable negatives are never lost, and I always felt those very early photographs were somehow the foundation of my work. Looking at them 30 years later was interesting; they were straight BW photographs taken with a SWC Hasselblad camera, a standard of that period. In some frames, I even remember using a soft yellow filter to enhance the sky a llitle bit, a detail that makes me think how very serious about the work I was already. They also look tentative and naive; it was my very first encounter with important architecture and It was the moment in which I realized architecture was an interesting subject. At (almost) 22, I had just finished my photography studies and my main concern was to be professional, to deliver what the client required. My school had a technical approach rather than an artistic one, so I knew very little about photography as a language. My only reference was Renger-Patzsch an the New Objectivity that I had found in a book, German photography from the 30s whit its soft tones and distanced approach. Of course, without internet, references were much harder to find for a young photographer. The plague that are extreme wide angle lenses along with the spectacular and, quite often, banal images they produce, had not yet arrived. Neither had social media and its endless carrousel. All of those circumstances had influence in the result of the series and in the way I think about photography in general and architectural photography in particular.

Then, 31 years later, there I was again. My idea was to photograph the historic building in use before the health assistance is moved to the new facilities. This time I will be using color and an 8X10 plate camera which produces very rich photographs, full of detail, and with deep sense of space. I had no plan other than showing up whit the camera until I ran out of film.