JORDI BERNADÓ. 10 Fundamental Photographers. On site. Architecture

By pure chance, Jordi Bernadó would say when telling how he made his photographs and how he became one of the reference architecture photographers, with a brilliant career also in his most personal work. It is not exactly true actually, but a sharp eye and a great number of trips around the world gave him the opportunity to encounter chance and therefore his work.

Something of a drift had his training as an architect. As he has mentioned on several occasions, he found by chance in photography a better tool to define and see the city, urbanism and architecture itself. A constant in his work as he repeatedly expresses when he says that to him the photographic practice is a way of knowledge, a decoding instrument to translate his environment personally, trying to cover a wide spectrum of possibilities.

A complex idea which may seem serious and give us a more introverted image of Jordi Bernadó than the image that have those who know him. His shots are full of narratives, but also of fiction and a great deal of irony. In this sense we highly recommend his book "Welcome to Espaiñ", by Actar, 2009, one of his best-known books and in which irony, biting humor and the questioning of stereotypes takes his search for contradictions, absurdities and his encounter with chance to the limit. It is here where his work captures us, the discovery of narratives that the photographer's eye freezes and that suggest new stories, very often over already-known areas.

The photographs presented today, by Jordi Bernado, could fit into a difficult set, the interpretation of landscape. Exterior images are more evident, absolutely spectacular as the one from Atlanta, complex as the one from Paris or disturbing as the image from Hong Kong. And so are the interior landscapes, as the one entitled Barcelona (BCN 34.4), a red, almost infinite landscape or quite the opposite in Buenos Aires (ARG 13.1), an interior staircase. His landscapes speak of the most intense territories, those which best define the place's inhabitants.

His images emerged at first parallel to the commissions he received, creating double images, that responded to customer expectations and at the same time allowed a second, more personal reading. Just like the recently published series about a project in Ullastret by Josep Lluis Mateo. His clients are architects, and his condition and training as an architect soaks his work constantly. This is clearly reflected in his recent intervention in Barcelona Pavilion, ​​where he recovered the original space designed by German architect Mies van der Rohe by just removing the doors, an almost minimalist intervention, full of double readings and complex narratives, the same as many of his images.

Text by.- José Juan Barba. Dr. Arquitecto.