Ford da facilidades (Ford Offers Facilities)

A representative of avant-garde photography in Catalonia and a pioneer, together with Josep Sala and Josep Masana, in advertising and industrial photography, Pere Català Pic is regarded as a modern-spirited photographer from the interwar period. His interest in science, technique, progress and modernity led him from an early age to vindicate photographic language as a stand-alone artistic practice and the potential of the photographic image in the medium of advertising. In 1931 he settled for good in Barcelona, where he moved into photography as an assistant to the photographer Rafael Areñas; the following year he changed his name, signing off with PIC (Publicidad Ilustrada Català – Illustrated Catalan Advertising). It was from this point, with his forays into photomontage and advertising photography, that he started to be considered a key figure in the reformist movement in Catalonia and Spain, introducing technical and linguistic processes directly linked to the European avant-garde. Influenced by resources from the new vision and new photography from Germany, and by artists like Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and John Heartfield, his advertising legacy from the 1930s, a period when he would also integrate Edward Steichen’s artistic language, is the greatest testament to his avant-garde concerns at a time when trade and businesses were willing to take a chance on the creativity imposed by progress. Furthermore, he was an active collaborator in magazines such as Ford, El Mirador, Art de la LLum and Publi-Graf, and his texts championed both photography as stand-alone art and the modernity of advertising photography. This photomontage, produced for the promotion and sale of his work, exemplifies the use of this medium to inject dynamism into the creation of advertising.

Salvador Nadales