When Humberto Rivas moved to Barcelona in 1976, from his birthplace of Buenos Aires, his arrival had a marked effect on Barcelona’s cultural milieu and his work had a considerable impact. Rivas played a fundamental role in the development of photography in Spain from the middle of the seventies.

Humberto Rivas’ photography can be classified within different photographic genres according to the historiography of the era, although he never submitted himself to any kind of classification, and this is where his contribution to the renewal of Spanish photography lies. His characters, in the same way as the cityscapes, as he liked to say, “choose it in order to be recorded by his camera”, form part of a specific contradiction: they are landscapes without people and people without landscapes; either one or the other, but never together in the same image.

The exhibition presents a large part of his photographic output.