Kim Manresa donates four works to the Pérez Siquier Centre

The photojournalist and documentary photographer Kim Manresa (Barcelona, 1961), one of the key names in modern Spanish photography, has just donated four of his most emblematic works to the Pérez Siquier Centre in Olula del Río. The images belong to his most significant and famous documentary series of denunciations, captured on his travels around the world in search of injustices and violations of rights of all kinds.

One of them belongs to the series made in Africa in 1997 about Kadi, a girl victim of clitoral ablation. This report had a great international impact, both in the press and on major television stations around the world, and served to raise awareness of this form of domination and subjugation of women. Kim received great recognition for her work.

From 1999 is the most iconic and shocking of the images that make up the report made in Bangladesh on the burnt women, which is also part of the Pérez Siquier Centre’s collection. This work had a similar impact and scope to that of Kadi.

From 2000 is another of the images donated, in this case belonging to the series on child prostitutes in Brazil, which is truly overwhelming. The fourth image is taken in Africa, in Mozambique, and depicts the harsh moment of a woman giving birth, totally helpless.

Since the beginning of his career, Kim Manresa has been one of the most committed storytellers in photography today. He uses a documentary style that is both classic and daring at the same time, to draw attention to what he considers important in order to stir consciences. His refined photographic technique, inherited from the great classical masters of generations before him, is placed at the service of a very clear, iron and indestructible intention and determination.

Kim Manresa has published over fifty books. In 1975, at the age of fourteen, he published his first images in several magazines. In 1977 he began working with Colita and also did his first work as a photojournalist, specialising in social issues and music groups. In 1979 he met the Civil War photographer Agustí Centelles, a fact that marked him deeply and was a determining factor in his decision to make social denunciation reports. In 1980 he travelled to Africa for the first time. This was followed by Cuba and the Caribbean. In 1985 he joined the newspaper La Vanguardia. In 1990 he published his famous trilogy on Barcelona, which includes Barcelona nit, El Molino and Los Travestis, a true trinity of his masterful photographic work and his peculiar way of getting involved and living with the people he portrays.

Since the late nineties, he has won a succession of prizes and awards, such as the Ortega y Gasset, the Godó Photojournalism Award, the Unicef Journalism Award, the Fotopress Award and the PHotojournalism Award in the USA. Elusive and swift, defiant of the powerful, he has always been on the margins of the law in order to carry out his work, subjected to enormous tests and risks.

Last Saturday Kim Manresa visited the Pérez Siquier Centre, posed with his four donated photographs, which have been installed in the contemporary photographers’ room, and gave Andrés García Ibáñez several of his most emblematic publications, dedicated and signed to the Ibáñez Cosentino Foundation, to be incorporated into the library of the museum institution.