Colita

COLITA is the pseudonym of Isabel Steva (b. 1940 in Barcelona), one of the leading exponents of contemporary Catalan photography. Direct, intelligent, sensitive, committed, critical, unprejudiced, her work can be defined, apart from its esthetic qualities, by its involvement with the times in which the photographer has lived. Free of artificiality and artistic pretentions, Colita’s work is not merely a documentation of reality but the projection of her own experiences and opinions, a visual corpus that reflects half a century of Spain’s recent history. This catalogue-book, published by RM under a joint imprint with the Fundació Catalunya–La Pedrera, on the occasion of the exhibition Colita, ¡porque sí! at La Pedrera, Barcelona (March 11–July 13, 2014), offers a comprehensive image of her work and throws into relief its versatility, humor, and incisiveness: ranging from the world of flamenco to the photography of feminist struggles, and including the interplay of dualities, cinema, Nova Cançó, the gauche divine of the 1960s, portraiture, photojournalism, and the life of her own city, Barcelona.