Co-published by Ediciones La Bahía and La Fábrica, Cowboy’s Dream is not an anthology of the best images from the enormous photographic archive of Antoni Miralda (Tarrasa, 1942), but rather a narrative constructed with 116 images, almost all of them unpublished, taken over thirty years by the artist in Europe (Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Vienna, Cuenca, London, Cologne…) and the United States (New York, Kansas City, Miami, Philadelphia…), mainly. By pure chance, Ignasi Duarte (Barcelona, 1976) discovered this photographic archive: an unpublished collection of more than 7,500 black and white negatives scattered in boxes and folders. The discovery reveals how Miralda conceives of photography: as a means of seeing. Sheltered behind the camera, he constructs reality, he invents it. Photography is at the genesis of the imagery that nourishes his entire known body of work His photographic archive comprises a vast repertoire of the unfamiliar, through which we witness how he delves into the cultural particularities that define the different groups of people he portrays. Ignasi Duarte believes that, after Cowboy’s Dream, we must consider Miralda as one of the most talented Spanish photographers of the second half of the 20th century. Cowboy’s Dream is also the catalogue for the exhibition curated by Ignasi Duarte at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, within PHotoESPAÑA, that was held between May 30 and September 17, 2023.
