1995-2024. Photographer Jordi Baron, through his family’s profession as an antique dealer, has a unique and privileged access to a very private world: he has access to the interior of many of Barcelona’s houses.
When the author arrives at these flats, the inhabitants have recently died, the relatives have divided part of the inheritance, and it is then that they want to sell all the rest that remains in the house. Other times, if there are family disagreements or if they are well-to-do families, the flats can remain closed for a long time, sometimes for years, treasuring all the memory inside, but that does not mean that they are abandoned, but closed, dormant, until the day comes when the owners decide to sell everything.

Jordi Baron’s photographs deal with the whole process of emptying flats and houses, mainly located in the Eixample and the old quarter of Barcelona, where their heirs have been selling everything: first the contents and then the continent.
Each of these flats, many of them immense, have then been divided into three or four apartments with the aim of using them, in most cases, for tourist rentals. It is thus the photo-finish of a bourgeois memory that has lasted some 120 years, and the birth of a new phenomenon that many cities are suffering from: Gentrification. An unstoppable drama that is driving out residents because of rising house prices.

The author, who works as an interior archaeologist, has been photographically documenting all these flats in the city of Barcelona for some 20 years with the aim of rescuing them moments before their disappearance. Ephemeral and often desolate landscapes, personal mementos on the floor, clothes, books, documents… and it is in these moments of change, of movement, that these photographs are taken. Without much time, in natural light, while the workers and transporters are busy dismantling beds, lamps, dragging and packing furniture that surely had not been moved from its place for more than 80 years.

The different ways of looking at and representing the ‘other’, the stranger, in the photographic portrait and within the history of photography, are very diverse. But when it comes to portraying distant individuals, where language, culture and the differences between the photographer and the person portrayed are so great, there are many possible interpretations. And this is what was implied by the first scientific-photographic expeditions, which in the middle of the 19th century travelled to exotic and distant countries such as South America and Africa, often places that were still practically unknown, to make inventories or anthropological files of the people found in those lands.
Rather than recognising a primitive culture as part of a diverse reality, the public of the time interpreted those portraits from the distance that separates civilisation from barbarism. In other words, everything that is not Western man is primitive, uncultured and savage.
he photographic series ‘anthropological file. Barcelona 2006-2010’, aims to be an inventory-record of people found at random in the same place and city (in this case in a corner of the beach of Barcelona) and to give them a global treatment inspired by those early scientific photographers, where the identity of each character is revealed only in a mere registration number in each photograph.
They are anonymous and catalogued types, where diversity confirms the great human movements of our days, far from what happened in the second half of the 19th century, when the search for the ‘different’ was one of the main arguments of travelling experiences.

The worship of gods and saints has been present in mankind since ancient times. If we look back, a large majority of people kept sculptures of popular saints and virgins in their homes for veneration. But this function of religious imagery can nowadays be altered mainly by the passage of time, generational change or fashions, and its use has often been forgotten or replaced by pure decoration. The erosion of the years has stripped these figures of everything they had to spare, turning them into crude sculpture. The garments have rotted and been cast, or have been mutilated, or have been left without polychromy. But most importantly, they have lost their original function: idolatry. It is then that they become misunderstood and enigmatic faces, old fallen idols, anonymous and unknown.
The entire collection of photographs in this series is printed with a 19th-century technique called vandyke brown and gold-tinted. And the type of support chosen: old written documents from the 19th century, where the faces of the image appear superimposed with the texts. Texts that are unrelated to the images have also lost their original function, and are now discourses devoid of meaning, where each work functions as an old relic.