Republic, War, Dictatorship: Fixa Sabaté photos

Eleven photographers have their work on display in this exhibition, among them Antonio Gavilán, Carlos Pérez de Rozas, Emilio Godes, Juan Gyenes and Salvador Torres Garriga. The images are recent high-quality reproductions of original negatives that were stored in Reproducciones Sabaté, one of the industrial photography labs in Barcelona, which is still active, where film producers left negatives of stills to make copies for the press and advertising.

Via stills of film shoots, this exhibition captures how, in those turbulent years when the Republic succumbed to the Franco dictatorship, film represented the ideal of society, with its contradictions and its own particular characteristics, illustrating how people worked and spent their leisure time, and how couples spent their time. The exhibition also aims to vindicate stills as an art form, and a much more important part of the process of film-making than they was previously considered.