“Hacer la calle” – Do the street 

Teo Vázquez is a photographer who lives and works in Barcelona. Through this project, he deals with issues such as immigration, the underground economy and civic regulations in urban space, giving them a comic and satirical touch.

Photography is conceived as a medium open to experimentation and social and spatial interaction. Based on these principles, his visual creations are representations of characters from the streets of Barcelona: workers who provide their services within the limits of legality, but who, at the same time, have become products and attractions of an increasingly touristic city. A prostitute, a can-man, a blanket seller, a scrap dealer and an accordion player will be the protagonists of the story.

The photographer highlights this contradiction in his work by transforming these characters into icons incorporated into public space. A process that starts from personal relationships and collaborations between a model and author to produce visual representations of exaggerated and shocking situations.

Printed on a large scale and black and white, his photographs appear on the walls of the city trying to awaken the passer-by from his daily life. These actions of incorporating photographs into the surface of the city are conceived as a medium for creating social interactions and contrasting opinions about the social and economic reality through art.

Through this process, the heterogeneity and the complex nature of the city are used as a metaphor in the creation and exhibition of the photographs. They are transformed into urban art, becoming part of the symbolic order of the city as physical objects. The act of transformation and the existence of these objects (and their parameters in space and time) contain different types of meanings. The exploration of these meanings at the individual level (photographer, passer-by, spectator or model) in the public space pursues a final representation of a collective nature.