Cámara y ciudad: La vida urbana entre la fotografía y el cine

The experience of the big city is part of the essential nature of our modernity. Throughout the 20th century, the metropolis acted not only as a social stage and political battlefield, but also as a wild playground. This exhibition on the Camera and the City is about the photographers and film makers who recorded, staged and dissected the city as they created different takes on urban life and culture. These narratives capture both the euphoria of the metropolis and the solitude of modern society, as well as conflict, war, reconciliation, protest, change and self-affirmation in the street. There are stories about the rise of the growing city and the melancholy of the shrinking city, encounters with others and the surveillance of citizens in the global village of our digital age.

This is the first time that major works from different collections at the Centre Pompidou —the departments of photography, experimental cinema, new media and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky—have been shown in dialogue with photographs and films from Spanish collections. We hope that this exhibition offers a valuable insight into how the camera helped shape the idea of urban life.