Joaquim Gomis: The Oblique Gaze

Joaquim Gomis was a businessman, photographer, patron of the arts and the first president of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (1972-1975). For over five decades his photographic output was prodigious and had close links with the ground-breaking currents of the time. He was a founder of ADLAN (Friends of the New Art, 1932-1936) and of Club 49 (1949-1971), two of the most active groups supporting avant-garde art in Catalonia between 1930 and 1970. The book is divided into two sections. The Oblique Gaze shows the photographer's output from 1922 to 1939, a period in which Gomis produced innovative, pioneering work that was in advance of the New Vision theoreticians and is important for an understanding of modern photography in Spain and in Europe. A large number of these photographs were taken during his visits to centres of art in Europe and the United States, such as New York, Paris, Prague and Barcelona. In the second section -Visual Narration- we see how in the 1940s Gomis began to systematically use series of photographs as an analytical method of working that was to culminate in the photoscopes, a publishing project in conjunction with Joan Prats that lasted for several decades. For this book we have selected the most representative photoscopes that provide a broad view of Gomis' interests, such as Eucaliptus, the ones on the human body, Barcelona, Atmósfera Miró, Gaudí, Ibiza fuerte y luminosa and Artesanía.