Area of identification
Reference code
CAT INSPAI 7
Level of description
Collection
Date(s)
Date of creation: 1960 / Date of addition: 2006
Volume and support
16,356 photographs in total: 32 photographs on paper (28 black and white photographs on paper, 13 × 18 cm format; 2 black and white photographs on paper, 18 × 24 cm format; 1 colour photograph on paper, 10 × 15 cm format; and 1 black and white photograph on paper, 11.5 × 11.5 cm format); 367 plastic negatives in black and white, 6 × 6 cm format; 1,298 plastic negatives in black and white, 35 mm format; 7,371 plastic negatives in colour, 35 mm format; 360 slides; and 8,557 digital images (with embedded metadata).
Context area
Name of producer(s)
Jordi Soler i Font
Producer history
Jordi Soler i Font (Les Fonts de Terrassa, April 16, 1938 - Girona, February 14, 2022)
Photographer, cartoonist and journalist.
Son of the writer Maria Assumpció Soler i Font, who had fled during the Franco bombings, and relative of the Esperantist priest Joan Font i Giralt. Around the age of fourteen he arrived in Girona, where he "contacted youth sectors, culturally restless, uncomfortable in the uniform grayness of the time". He began writing for the magazines Usted and Presència towards the end of the 1960s. As a young man, under the Franco dictatorship, he was rejected by the Girona Photographic Association. From 1969 to 1981 he lived in Madrid, where he worked in the communication and advertising department of a household appliance company. In 1981 he returned to Girona and became one of the prominent "multimedia" contributors to the newspaper El Punt. On March 13, 1982, Sísif appeared for the first time alongside La Punxa d'en Jap by Joan Antoni Poch i Goicoetxea in what became one of the "good examples of bad dialogues", in the great tradition by Molière, Jacint Verdaguer and Lewis Carroll.
In 2007, Soler ceded a significant part of his photographic archive of more than 100,000 copies to the Diputació de Girona. In 2009, L'Arc in Girona dedicated an exhibition to him with some remarkable photos from this collection.
Archive history
Jordi Soler first delivered material corresponding to the 1960s and 1970s, with images from the years he lived in Madrid and images of Girona. This first acquisition contained images intended for a book about the 1960s that was never published. At the same time, he brought colour negatives from the newspaper El Punt.
On 2 April 2007, he delivered 77 plastic negatives in black and white with a 6 × 6 cm format and 154 plastic negatives in black and white with a 24 × 26 cm format. On 13 July 2007, he delivered 252 photographs (plastic negatives); on 18 July 2007, 1,418 photographs (6 × 6 cm and 35 mm plastic negatives); on 16 October 2007, 6,493 photographs (plastic negatives); and on 14 November 2007, 1,300 photographs (plastic negatives). On 20 February 2009, he delivered 4,992 digital images and 848 colour negatives (35 mm). Since then, there have been successive accruals in the format of 35 mm colour negatives, slides, and digital images. All of the images are the result of photographer Jordi Soler's work as a graphic reporter.
The fonds has been fully digitised and relocated to permanent preservation material according to formats: paper, plastic, and digital. In the case of the plastic negatives, we also distinguished between black and white and colour, relocating them to different albums.
Since grouping according to reports is difficult in some cases, we opted to number the images as reports (and as units of description) on the basis of the way they came in the envelopes, after verifying that the envelopes corresponded to groupings by report and/or by theme. The reports were sequentially numbered, and on each album page we specified the report number and the amount of frames that form it.
The digital images (including both original physical images and original digital images) were changed to a 16-bit Adobe RGB TIFF format for the preservation master copy.
Details of entry
On 6 March 2007, a contract for the gratuitous loan and subsequent donation of Jordi Soler's photographic fonds was signed by the photographer himself and Girona Provincial Council. The contract provided that the donation would be made effective three years later, once there were no modifications; therefore, on 6 March 2010.
Content area and structure
Scope and content
The images, dating from 1960 to 2004, are of Girona, Barcelona, Madrid, and municipalities in Girona province. They depict daily life in Girona and Madrid in the 1960s and 1970s and they include interviews and portraits, thus forming a graphic history of Girona province (with the opening of Girona Airport, interviews with Salvador Espriu and Francesc Català-Roca, etc.).
Related documentation area
Related documentation
The envelopes and folders that contained the photographs brought by photographer Jordi Soler. The Arxiu Municipal de Girona (Girona Municipal Archive) acquired the fonds from El Punt, the newspaper for which Jordi Soler i Font worked as draftsman and photographer.
