Fundación Foto Colectania Museum

Fundación Foto Colectania Museum

Foto Colectania is a non-profit organisation, founded in Barcelona in 2002, to disseminate photography and introduce it within the social, artistic and educational field in our country.

The programs undertaken at the Foundation, from exhibitions to activities and publications, are based on the creation of an innovative, participatory and inclusive project focused on thought around image and its basic foundations, enhancing its communicative capacity and its suitability to generate critical thinking.

Foto Colectania especially works at two different levels: on the one hand, within the context of the city of Barcelona, presenting a high quality cultural offer focused on excellence; and on the other hand, within the international context, producing and disseminating projects by Catalan and Spanish artists abroad.

The Foundation also has a Library specialised in Photography and a collection of photographs that holds more than 3,000 works by Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese photographers; besides, the collection includes the archive of the Spanish photographer Francisco Gómez, donated by his family in 2001, as well as the archives of several private collectors.

Foto Colectania has a wide range of audiences. Its activity has been awarded in several occasions with some prizes, such as the ARCO prize for the Best National Initiative of Private Collecting, an award granted by ARCO’s Association of Friends, and awarded to Mario Rotllant, the Foundation’s President (2006); the prize for the Best Programming awarded by the Catalan Association of Art Critics (ACCA), in recognition of the Foundation’s task of disseminating Photography collecting and of its programming, consistent with the Foundation’s main objectives (2007); the Bartolomé Ros Prize, awarded in the framework of the PhotoEspaña Festival in Madrid, for the Foundation’s career in Photography (2012); and the Trends prize of “El Mundo” for the consolidated cultural industry (2013).

Since its opening in 2002, Foto Colectania has expressed a clear commitment to disseminating photography and collecting through an extensive program of exhibitions, touring shows and activities. After 20 years of work based on the closeness, we have become a meeting point capable of convening a wide range of audiences.

Among the key and distinguishing issues our new programs and objectives for the next few years are ruled by, one can find: a special emphasis on the activities parallel to the exhibitions that highlight the different photography practices and the role of the image in contemporary society; an immersion in the virtual environment (Foto Colectania on-line); a continuous enhancement of the Collection’s value, one of the most important photography legacies in our country; and, finally, promoting new educational projects and supporting research.

Among the programs developed that year, we can highlight “Correspondence“, a program on photography thinking, and the two editions of DONE, a project to support contemporary creation and thinking within the framework of the image’s new ecosystem.

At the venue of Paseo Picasso 14, which opened its doors in 2017, we offer diverse experiences thanks to a space that has a temporary exhibitions hall, a library, a room to present audio-visuals and the conservation chamber for the photography collection.

At Foto Colectania, we continue to trust in an innovative management model based on the creation of synergies and alliances with different public and private sector entities, creating added value for our partners. The active role that our Friends and Benefactors have as representatives of our project and as a bridge between the cultural and social world aims to have as much impact on the fundraising as on the support of Foto Colectania’s social development and mission.