I spent a week in March doing nothing in particular except walking with a camera. No assignments, no themes, no agenda. I wanted to see what the city handed me if I stopped looking for anything specific.
What it handed me, mostly, was people in transit. Everyone moving. Everyone carrying something.
People carrying suitcases in El Raval
El Raval on a Tuesday morning is a particular kind of busy. Not the performative busyness of tourist Barcelona but the functional kind: people going to work, dragging luggage to the bus station, arguing on the phone. The light there is always a little strange — narrow streets, buildings that haven't been renovated, shadows that fall at unexpected angles.
A man skating
Tourists cycling near the beach
On the third day I went to the Passeig Joan de Borbó and sat on the stairs for an hour, watching. A couple shared a phone screen, leaning into each other. Two teenagers argued and then laughed. An old man ate something out of a paper bag, slowly, with great deliberation. No one looked up.
Tourists and locals at the steps of Passeig Joan de Borbó, early spring
Market Casa Italia
She told me about her husband, who had recently passed away. Sixty years of marriage had flown by, she said. Just like that.
I met this woman on my way to the beach. We talked for twenty minutes.
The last frame I took that week was through a window — a futbolín table, unmanned, lit by a single bulb. I don't know why I stopped for it. Sometimes you don't need a reason. You just raise the camera.
Futbolín — Barcelona FC vs Real Madrid
