The Girona City Council receives the donation from the fund of the photographer Josep Maria Oliveras

Girona City Council has received the donation from the fund of the photographer Josep Maria Oliveras. It consists of almost 300,000 photographs in various media, more than 5 terabytes of digital images and 100 hours of video with content from various professional projects. This morning the fund was presented at a press conference by the mayor of Girona, Marta Madrenas; from the head of the Document Management Service, Archives and Publications of Girona City Council, Joan Boadas, and the photographer, Josep Maria Oliveras.

"I want to thank Josep Maria Oliveras for the trust he has placed in the Image Research and Diffusion Center (CRDI) and, in general, in Girona City Council for depositing 300,000 moments of his life, thoughts and images that will effectively build the our memory and will help explain our own history. The will of this government has been and is to preserve the funds and ensure universal dissemination, and we will do so," said the mayor of Girona, Marta Madrenas.

This huge volume of documentation in images is the result of the professional career of Josep Maria Oliveras who, although he has stood out mainly as a photographer, has also worked as a curator of exhibitions, as an editor and creator of photography books or in the realization of graphic documentary works for numerous exhibitions and TV programs for cultural diffusion.

Josep Maria Oliveras started professionally in the field of photography in 1979, specifically in press photography and in the photographic illustration of books and art catalogues. The same year he founded Taller Fotogràfic Desalt, a cultural space from which he coordinated numerous exhibitions and photographic projects. He later moved to Mexico where he participated in the production of audiovisual materials as part of the National Literacy Program. In 1986, he worked in Paris on several projects for the publishing group Casterman and La Sept ARTE TV, and carried out photographic documentary work dedicated to the figure of Leon Trotsky.

Throughout his career he has published more than fifty photographic books and his photographs have been seen in a multitude of exhibition halls and photography festivals. In 2019, he won the international video competition: Parallel traces, presence at present, promoted by the European Union as part of the Creative Europe program. In 2020, the Acquisitions Commission of the National Photography Plan of the Generalitat de Catalunya approved the purchase of 25 of his original photographs for the National Photography Collection.

His work has been cited by several personalities from the world of photography and culture in general, such as Joan Fontcuberta, who refers to his work with these words: "This necessary degree of awareness is what an author like Josep Maria Oliveras: creator without ties, indifferent to the dominant currents and faithful to himself and to a serene conception of documentary photography that is rooted in his own historical maturity. The work of Josep Maria Oliveras has the value of reminding us of genuinely photographic values in the most valuable tradition of the classics, while bringing into play the device of a meditative vision that is projected onto the landscape to consummate in each image an exchange of matter and spirit".

The fund has been transferred to the Center for Research and Diffusion of the Image (CRDI) where it will be preserved and carried out a cataloging and digitizing work of the analogue material with the aim of making it available to the public and the general public