Barcelona

Walls is a series of photographs in Janelle Lynch: Barcelona, forthcoming by Radius Books (Santa Fe, Fall 2013). I made the images with an 8-x-10-inch camera and portrait lens in the Rubí stream outside of Barcelona, Spain, where I lived from 2007-2011. The work follows a decade-long photographic investigation of the life cycle in the landscape. Walls explores the questions: what remains after absence and loss, what lingers, what persists in being despite what is gone? The subject matter of each photograph includes the streambed in the foreground and detritus embedded in or attached to the vegetation on the banks. Traces of personal affects are seen among the refuse—some likely the vestiges of household items swept away in massive deluge of 1962, which also claimed many lives. These images pay homage to the people lost then, to those known and unknown who have come before us, but whom remain present in spirit. Walls also celebrates nature’s perseverance and beauty, while lamenting man’s destruction of the environment.