Barcelona acquires the fund of the photographer Humberto Rivas

The Institut de Cultura de Barcelona has acquired the collection of the photographer Humberto Rivas (Buenos Aires, 1937- Barcelona, 2009), thus culminating a process that must guarantee the conservation and dissemination of the work of the Argentinian author, established in the city since 1976. With the purchase, the City Council demonstrates the recognition of the importance of Humberto Rivas in the story of contemporary photography in Barcelona, and the will of the family materializes so that the fund continues to the city where the author spent more than half of his life. Rivas' creative career was recognized with awards such as the National Photography Award (1997), the Plastic Arts Award of Barcelona City Council (1997) and the Gold Medal for Artistic Merit (2009); the square at the back of the Can Basté Civic Centre, where he taught, bears his name.

The fund acquired includes a set made up of 23,193 negatives, plates and slides of different sizes, as well as contacts; 6 models of photomontages; 200 original prints made by Humberto Rivas that represent the themes that characterize the author's work (characters from Catalonia, portraits, still lifes, facades of decadent shops, night and day urban landscapes...) and a batch of textual documentation, the largest part made up of preparatory notes for the classes he taught, but also clippings from the period and other personal documents, including the correspondence with the photographer and designer America Sánchez, also from Argentina, who encouraged him to install be in the city A good part of this fund was already deposited in the AFB under a convenience regime; it was moved there in 2017 by the photographer's family following a flood at the Rivas home, with the aim of guaranteeing its conservation.

Humberto Rivas is an author of great relevance for contemporary Catalan photography. His arrival in Barcelona in 1976, during the Transition and shortly before Videla's coup d'état in Argentina, facilitated the renewal of photographic rhetoric and the recognition of younger authors who did not stick to strict documentary. Rivas shook this tribute to realism with his avant-garde look and his conviction of the artistic potential of photography. The uniqueness of its background is not only photographic, but also historical.

Prolific author, he cultivated with special interest two great themes, the portrait and the landscape. The portraitist Rivas worked under the premise of capturing person after person, interested both in anonymous people and in the great personalities of his time. His roots in Barcelona coincided with the emergence of figures linked to Catalan politics and culture. He photographed them at the same time as their fame grew. Landscape designer Rivas is defined by his predilection for decadent and empty urban spaces, with the desire to speak of presence from absence. In one of the last projects of his career, Rivas traced the physical traces of the Civil War in Catalonia. Huellas, as this work is titled, was already part of the municipal photographic heritage. In 2009, the Barcelona City Council bought the series, made up of 53 photochemical prints made by the Sabaté laboratories under the supervision of the same author. In 2016, it was exhibited in the AFB room and a catalog was published.

The conservation of the Humberto Rivas collection at the Photographic Archive of Barcelona will facilitate the study of this author, since apart from the prints, scholars will be able to consult all the documentation and models. The definitive entry of this fund represents an important step in the consolidation of the AFB as a point of reference in the conservation, custody and dissemination of the city's photographic heritage.