Barcelona inspires a photography exhibition by Study Abroad students

29/11/2019

As a part of the Digital Photography course taught by Gunnar Knechtel and Christiane Von Enzberg, students have been asked to take pictures of those aspects of the city and its surrounding area which they have found most enticing. The black and white and color pictures on display offer a multicultural perspective of our architecture, our markets, our sports activities and the population of Barcelona. Thus, the exhibition is structured as a mosaic which documents the urban experience of international students during their academic sojourn in the Pre-Established Study Abroad programme.

This is the second time the students’ work is exhibited. The professors have proposed the first edition’s theme once more, “Barcelona inspires”, because it ensures students will have a wide range of subjects to focus on. The budding phorographers have to be able to explain a story using only 10 images. As a preliminary task, they have to present a written summary of the story to ensure that the creative process is not arbitrary. Only one of the presented images is chosen for the exhibition.
Most students are visiting Barcelona for the first time and, according to their teachers, they are in awe of Gaudí, the city’s públic transportation, the food and the warmth of its citizens.

Even though smartphone cameras are very good nowadays, the course interests many students, who continue to enroll in order to become acquainted with the basic technical aspects of the digital camera and to learn to use it in a creative way. This will be the 12th time that Gunnar has taught the course. His personal portfolio is impressive. He has published his pictures in El País Semanal, Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic, Der Spiegel, Stern or The Guardian, among others. Like Gunnar, Christiane, who is also German, studied at Lette-Verein in Berlin, the emblematic school for applied arts founded in 1866, and has exhibited her work at the Goethe Insitute, the Valid Foto Gallery, the Zumaia Kultur Etxea, the Getxo Photo Festival and the Gallerie der Stadt Tuttlingen.

The exhibition “Barcelona Inspires” can be visited at Casa Convalescència until the 10th of December.