After five group shows at espai [b] in Gràcia, it felt strange to walk into a street photography exhibition in Barcelona and find my prints hanging somewhere else. On Tuesday 3 November, PH21 Gallery opened its new space on Carrer de Regomir, in the Gothic Quarter, with In Dialogue with StreetMax21: the work of the British photographer StreetMax21shown alongside a group exhibition of nineteen Barcelona street photographers. Three of my reflections were on the wall.
A rainy night on Carrer de Regomir
It rained in Barcelona all day, and hardest during the hours of the opening. It didn’t keep people away. From early on the doorway was busy: people standing on the wet stone step to talk, the exhibition poster in the window, the white light of the gallery spilling onto the dark paving of the Gothic Quarter. Later in the evening there were moments when it was hard to move inside.
Opening night on a wet Carrer de Regomir — Leica Q3
I'll admit I was nervous. A new gallery is a new experience, and this time most of the audience were photographers, some of them well known names in Barcelona street photography. It is one thing to show your work to friends and family, and quite another to hang it in a room full of people who spend their own afternoons doing exactly what you do, and who know how much luck and how much waiting goes into a single frame.
The new space is long and narrow, with whitewashed beams, track lights and a wooden floor, the frames hung close together on both walls. Before the crowd arrived it still had the calm of a room being looked at for the first time, with a few early visitors leaning in towards the prints and a laptop open on a small table by the entrance.
The new space, before the crowd — Leica Q3
My three photographs on the wall
My three photographs hang in a single column, one above the other: Estació de França at the top, Passage in the middle and Ghost Game at the bottom. All three belong to an ongoing body of work about Barcelona seen twice, where a polished floor, a pane of glass or a sheet of water on a station concourse turns the city into two versions of itself in a single frame. Nothing is staged. The reflection is already there for anyone standing in the right place, and a minute later it is gone.
Estació de França, Passage and Ghost Game — Leica Q3
Passage was taken from very low, almost at floor level, in a covered walkway where the polished stone mirrors everything around it. A woman and a girl walk out of the light in silhouette, and a sunlit street of balconied buildings opens at the far end. Printed at 45 centimetres and set in a wide white mat, the floor becomes the real subject, a long strip of reflected sky running towards the viewer.
Passage, 2023 — Leica Q3
Ghost Game is the strangest of the three. I shot it through the window of an indoor basketball court, and the glass layered the street outside over the game: the giant, translucent legs of passers-by stride across the court while the young players carry on beneath them. On the gallery wall, under the track lights, the two layers read even more clearly than they do on a screen.
Ghost Game, 2023 — Leica Q3
There is something quietly formal about seeing a small printed label under your own photograph: name, title, year, giclée print, 30 × 45 cm, edition of ten. It turns an image I have looked at hundreds of times on a monitor into an object that belongs to someone else's room for two weeks.
Name, title, edition — Leica Q3
As the evening went on and I talked with most of the other photographers, the nerves faded. I think my photographs were well received. One comment stayed with me more than any other: someone told me the prints had made them stop and look for a long time, and think, because they were not photographs for a single glance. That is exactly what I hope reflections can do.
With Passage and Ghost Game — Leica Q3
A street photography exhibition in dialogue with StreetMax21
The show is built as a conversation, and StreetMax21's photograph of Broadgate in London, the image chosen for the invitation, sets the tone: two men in silhouette crossing between stone columns under a slatted wooden ceiling, one reading his phone, the other with his hand to his ear, while a woman in pink walks past a steel wall in the distance. Light, architecture and people passing through it is a language many of us in the room share.
StreetMax21, Broadgate — Leica Q3
What surprised me most was the level of the work. Almost every photograph on those walls was strong, more than I had expected from a group show of nineteen photographers with very different ways of seeing. I spent time with Xavi Herrero, Andrea Aguirre, Claudia Bonazzi, Bruno Sergio Bertini, Mattia Compagnucci, Aina Del Arco and Iván Sánchez Jiménez, among others. Andrea, an Ecuadorian photographer, stood next to her series from Rio de Janeiro: a crowd silhouetted against a sunset sky, a game on the sand under floodlights, a dark beach at night.
Andrea Aguirre and her Rio series — Leica Q3
Zsolt's welcome and a flute between the frames
Zsolt Bátori, the gallery's director, welcomed everyone with real enthusiasm for the new space, larger and better placed in the Gothic Quarter. He said he was very happy with the photographers and the photographs chosen for this dialogue with StreetMax21, invited us to keep sending work for future exhibitions, and allowed himself a few minutes of philosophy about photography, which is his field. None of the photographers spoke. Around him, people listened from folding chairs and filmed with their phones, and a small child in a yellow jumper wandered between the legs of the audience.
Zsolt Bátori welcomes the room — Leica Q3
The evening also had music. A flautist in black played from a score on a music stand, right beside the prints, while the conversation carried on around her. Later, when I spoke with Zsolt on my own, he encouraged me to keep an eye on the gallery's open calls, and Xavi Herrero, who founded and directs the Street Photography Barcelona Contest, invited me to the opening of this year's finalists' exhibition this Friday at Galerie Art Nomade, a few streets away in El Born. Two openings in one week: November has started well for street photography in Barcelona.
A flute between the frames — Leica Q3
Family, friends and a full room
My wife came, with our two daughters and our two granddaughters. My eldest daughter stood in front of the wall where Passage and Estació de França hang, and looked straight into the lens when I raised the camera. My friends Jordi Comes and Benet Solina, with whom I have shared every show at espai [b], came too, and spent a good while talking with Zsolt, gallerist and photographers comparing notes. On a day of such bad weather, it meant a lot to me that they made the trip to be there.
Family in front of the wall — Leica Q3
By the end of the evening the room was full: photographers, families and friends, all of them happy to be there. For photographers, a night like this is a big occasion, a chance to see their work on a wall and in front of an audience. Zsolt and his wife, the philosopher and architecture historian Borbála Jász, looked after everyone with great kindness. I left well after dark, very satisfied with having shown some of my photographs, and with the conversations I had with the other photographers, with Zsolt and with Borbála.
A full room on Carrer de Regomir — Leica Q3
In Dialogue with StreetMax21 runs until 19 November at PH21 Gallery, Carrer de Regomir 4bis, Barcelona, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 4 to 8 pm. If you're in the city, come and see it on the wall. Subscribe to the newsletter to get new stories like this one each month, along with a free street photography guide.
Photos: Leica Q3 · 28mm · PH21 Gallery, Barcelona, 2026
See more reflections in the portfolio. Passage, Ghost Game and Estació de França are also available as fine art prints.
Cosme Lapena is a Barcelona-based street and urban photographer and founder of bCLPhoto.
Exhibited at espai [b] since 2010 and PH21 Gallery · Published in The Eye of Photography and 35mmc.
Browse the portfolio or read more on the blog.
