Repression in La Rambla of Barcelona

New chapter of Albert Tarragó's Graphic work catalog:

When to copying photos is called do portraits

           Twelve years ago, when a portraitist applied for a permit to draw people in La Rambla, then the City council examined him by asking him to draw a person in front a commission of experts.

            But after eight years on the street many portraitists had grown used to copying photos instead of drawing the people. To do this, they were using as a bait astonishing photorealistic drawings made ​​with the help of a projector such that hardly they could match its effect when the client was a person sitting before them. The disappointment caused by this widespread practice had been increasing distrust among the public, thus, the difficulty to find customers had risen while prices decreased to almost those of caricatures.

            But the worst started to happen the day it was the public administration itself and local police those who started to require the portraitists to exhibit those misleading portraits copied from photos as a sample for the public. Paradoxically, insisted, it was the only technique for which they had been autorized.

LINK TO THE NEW CHAPTER OF CATALOG