After living more than a decade in London, photographer Lluís Artus came back to Barcelona, and he found a city much different from the one he left when he left in the mid-90s.
Now with the beginning of the tourism boom and new immigration one of the places where these new changes were most evident in the human landscape were the beaches of Barcelona. A human mosaic where you could find people of all nationalities, all social conditions, and people of all ages.
In the summer of 2007 this made him decide to start a series of portraits of vacationers and bathers that would last for 15 years. Artús likes to think of this work as an anthropological study of a public space frequented by millions of people, from lifelong “barceloneteros” to tourists of every imaginable nationality, from luxury hotel guests to immigrants who have just arrived in the city, from groups of teenagers to retired people exercising.
Images of this work have been awarded internationally and have been published in media such as The Times, The Independent , Suddeutsche Zeitung and The Republic . They have also been exhibited at the art fair Berliner List , an exhibition individual to the London gallery Diemar Noble and have been finalists for the prestigious Taylor Award Wessin of the national Portrait Gallery from London and also finalists of Discoveries PhotoEspaña .
