Radius Books published Janelle Lynch’s Barcelona as a hardcover volume of 115 pages, and the book is best understood as the record of a four-year inquiry rather than a survey of a city. From 2007 to 2011, while living in Spain, Lynch worked the fallow ground outside Barcelona with an 8 x 10-inch camera fitted with a portrait lens. Her subjects are modest and specific: pylons, puddles, leaves, litter, trees read as anthropomorphic presences, walls of vegetation, rocks, disintegrating leaves, along the Llobregat river and the Rubí stream. The publisher describes these motifs as metaphors for absence and presence, mourning and remembrance.
Lynch is the volume’s photographer and its author. A personal essay on her early relationship with nature opens the book, and her writing in English and Spanish runs through the remaining pages, interleaved with quotations from three figures who shaped the work: Charles Burchfield, whose painterly animations of landscape she has cited as an influence; Wendell Berry, on approaching nature with respect and humility; and Roland Barthes, whose discussion of mourning in Camera Lucida bears directly on the project. Two dedications anchor it: Lynch’s grandmother, who died in 2008, and the victims of the 1962 flood in the region.
The photographs do not treat Barcelona as destination. They stay at the urban edge, where water, stone, vegetation and discarded things register time and human use, and the portrait lens brings an unexpected intimacy to terrain usually passed without notice. The result sits within Lynch’s sustained thinking about representations of the life cycle in landscape, and the book’s five series are ordered as an argument rather than a sequence of highlights.
For a collector, the appeal lies in that integration. The writing is structural, not supplementary; text and image were composed together, and the volume carries the coherence of a single authored project rather than a gathering of prints. The publisher also lists a signed version, which may interest readers who follow Lynch’s work across her Radius Books monographs. The book’s quietness is its point: it asks to be read slowly.
