Toni Catany
The quest for beauty
The village house where Mallorcan photographer Toni Catany (Llucmajor, 1942–2013) was born is now home to the Toni Catany International Photography Centre, which will preserve over 15,000 photos, 165,000 negatives and 500 works from Catany’s contemporary photography collection. A self-taught collector of moments, in 1991 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, and in 2011 he was awarded the Spanish National Photography Prize, alongside other merits, for his constant quest for beauty.
text César Mateu Moyà
“Photography is like a huge tree with many different branches and multiple gazes. It is the manner in which I have chosen to express myself”, asserted Toni Catany, who started out in the world of photography through a correspondence course in 1957.
Catany was born in Llucmajor, in the south of the island, two decades before the arrival of mass tourism. A place surrounded by wild, autochthonous nature, with no more buildings than the old village houses. Images that remained etched on his memory and which pursued him on each and every one of his trips around the world, like a constant search for a happy place in the past that he still yearned for.
His passion for travel emerged in the late 1960s, during a job he was commissioned to undertake with writer and journalist Baltasar Porcel, to document the end of the war between Israel and Egypt. “On that trip [...]
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