Medicine & photography

In 1980, I made my first story in a Psychiatric Institute that no longer exists. My father wanted me to be a doctor, but the most I got related to this profession was working as an administrative assistant at the Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona for several years.

That circumstance familiarized me with the hospital environment and without even realizing it I found myself photographing a world that was buzzing around me. When the hospital opened a multimedia department, I was asked to lead it and that is how I got started in medical photography.

Given my position and the fact that everyone knew me, I did not need to ask permission to take pictures in an environment where it is very complicated to bring a camera. This familiarity allowed me to make a story in the course of a year in which I documented childhood cancer. A report whose catalog was sold for charity and an exhibition produced by the Fundació Enriqueta Villavecchia that toured for two decades throughout Spain.

This work opened the doors of different hospitals. From there came "A hospital Heartbeat" and other themes that I have been developing over time.

Operating rooms, emergency services, cancer, nephrological problems, traumatology... over forty years I have been gradually expanding a particular chronicle on Medicine between centuries. In 2020, the year of the Covid, the book CurArte appeared, which shows a substantial part of my work, and today I work as far as I can find financial support documenting traditional healing in the world (so far I have found graphic testimonies in 22 countries); and also other topics that have little social visibility, such as Cerebral Palsy, a topic that I have included in the section "Photojournalism and essay" since in this case I asked the children to collaborate also with their own photographs.