Producer history
Joan Comalat i Vilà (Girona, 1953) is a journalist and architectural engineer. He taught himself photography, but also took courses in the Escola Tècnica d'Alta Fotografía school in Madrid and the International Center of Photography in New York, and he attended a workshop on digital photography in the EGM laboratories in Barcelona.
He has had over twenty individual exhibitions and has collaborated in over thirty collective exhibitions. He was co-founder and co-director of Galeria Spectrum (1980-1983) in Girona together with Ramon Panosa and Joaquim Bosch, and he was head of photography at the newspaper Punt Diari from its foundation in 1979 until March 1985. In 1987, he left the newspaper and has since published photographs in different national and international print media.
In 1985, he received a grant from the Government of Catalonia (Interdepartmental Committee on Technology Research and Innovation - CIRIT) to run workshops at the prestigious International Center of Photography in New York with teachers Nancy Brown and Barbara Crane. In 1998, he became more interested in teaching photography and has taught different courses throughout Girona province.
Archive history
The entire fonds has been digitised and was acquired by Girona Provincial Council in 2000. The delivery was made in 26 albums of photographs in mediocre or poor condition. Some albums had polyester negatives stuck to the sheets of glassine paper because of the moisture caused by a leak or flood in the place where the albums were found. In some cases, the glassine paper had become stuck to the emulsion, especially in the case of negatives placed on the edges of the pages.
The reports in the fonds were described in a general way with the corresponding dates and a short description made by the photographer when he stored the negatives. Each album had a list with a general description handwritten by the photographer with the date and the title.
The fonds was initially described in a database using these lists and complementing them with information from a newspaper library. The negatives were relocated to new albums with glassine paper sheets and later with 75 micron polyester sheets for permanent preservation. The digital copy of the images on DVD was changed to uncompressed 16-bit TIFF files, with a 21 × 30 cm format.
