Leopold Samsó So far, so close

Leopold Samsó (Barcelona, 1946) has been working on photography for more than fifty years as a profession in which the personal and observant gaze of the photographer has prevailed, the one who behind the camera wonders what values a mediatized gaze can bring to a machine His brilliant advertising career has not prevented him from developing a personal work as a photographer of a singularity that makes it hardly comparable to other photographic looks we know. He has always been close to art, artists and an aesthetically natural look.

His personal files have been hidden from public view for a long time, and in 2018 he decided to review the negatives. His portraits of artists from the 1980s are now being discovered, some photographs of this rogue and forgotten Barcelona of the 1970s, which the inhabitants who knew it miss with melancholy. But Leopold Samsó has traveled a lot around the world, through Latin America, he has visited the cultures of Ecuador, Morocco, Haiti, and he has left his mark on the unknown landscapes of Andalusia and Portugal in the portfolio The balance of the 'ombra (2022), closing his landscape tour with a deep and sensitive work of the force of nature in Iceland, another high-quality portfolio that has just seen the light of day.

His photography has nothing to do with the poetics of the moment, but rather with the poetics of permanence. The density, the "punctum", as Roland Barthes would say, extends throughout the photographic space. This density that characterizes his photographic look is temporary to achieve timelessness. His aesthetics, therefore, do not respond to the qualities of the photographic apparatus, which are also important, but to the photographer's inner gaze, which lets the emotions flow, and where the free spirit, contemplation, irony are stirred , the game, the space, the scenography, the architecture, the light and the dark.

Because if there is another factor, apart from space and time, that takes shelter in photography, it is light. Natural light fascinates this photographer. It exhausts the capacity of the light, the force to the extreme to endow the photograph with a special drama when appropriate. In Leopold Samsó, photography becomes a kind of ritual, a natural and mechanical gesture that ends in rest and silence, that goes from the fleeting instant to the act that remains, like a miracle between a reality that travels from the ephemeral to the unchanging

Now, with the generosity that is his own, he has wanted to donate more than two hundred photographs to the Vila Casas Foundation, a selection of which constitutes this exhibition.