Let me Tell you About Barcelona
Because I can't show you
Barcelona is the only city I’ve visited more than once. After living in Madrid for three years, Barcelona gave me the impression of being the cooler sibling out of the two. Madrid is more composed, all suits and blazers, but Barcelona was relaxed, jeans and a sweater, and perhaps crucially, more international. It also helped that I had two family friends living in Barcelona, and hearing their college stories was enough to convince high school me that Barcelona was where everything was happening.
In my gut I knew that I would love Barcelona, and the first time I went I was not disappointed. I visited with my grandparents in early 2022 and in a tough moment that would scare all of us, my grandma got COVID, and we had to hastily return to Madrid to carry out quarantine. In that time I was still shooting with my Canon M50, and although I thought I was getting amazing photographs, I did not.
The second time I visited Barcelona, I met up with my parents during the spring break of my freshman year of university, and the excitement of seeing a city that I knew I loved kept me up the night before the flight. After a great trip, I said goodbye to my parents and made my way back to Amsterdam with chocolate that they gave me for Easter and an SD card full of mediocre-ish photos.
The third time I visited Barcelona was last week. This was different, for the first time I was going with a friend in lieu of my parents who, despite being reasonably fun people, not the ones that I wanted to hang out with at a Barcelona club at four am. I was also excited to photograph. My skills had gotten better over the last year and I knew that in this trip there would be no COVID or emotional family reunions to distract me from taking the types of pictures I wanted to take.
After arriving and settling down, we grabbed our sunglasses (a welcome accessory after a particularly cloudy Dutch winter), and I slung my camera over my shoulder. It was midday and close to Easter, so the city was bustling with tourists and locals on the hunt for UV rays. Our first order of business was satiating our travel day hunger with dumplings and other great food from Mosquito, located in the Born (would recommend!!).
Then, we decided to check off some of the more touristy stuff from our Barcelona list before the density of tourists got even greater as the week guided us from a relatively normal Tuesday to Holy Thursday and Good Friday. We dragged our feet through the narrow cobble streets of the Born to the much wider and busier Las Ramblas.
I had yet to snap a photo, but then a man in his mid to late thirties zoomed past me. From behind, I could see that he had three cameras slung across his back in a very Joe Greer kind of way. It was a comical scene, this man in the crowded street, with his cameras and his roller skates. I reached for my Fuji and brought the viewfinder to my eye as I simultaneously flicked the dial from off to on with my index finger.
There was nothing to see.
I confirmed that I had taken the lens cap off the lens (common mistake), and tried turning the camera off and on again. It was not turning on. My friend looked over at me with a puzzled face. She already did not see the appeal of carrying a relatively heavy piece of equipment all day when a “phone can now shoot in 4k.”
I walked around the rest of the day feeling the weight of my faulty/broken/dead/out of battery(?) camera. The craziest thing is that I rarely remember every shot of a photo walk, and yet I remember every shot I missed that first day in Barcelona. The bright colors of the Boqueria market, the American tourists and their ridiculous shirts, the vermouth setup in every little terrace, I could go on.
Once we made it back, I left my camera charging, hoping that this would be like that one time my Kindle randomly powered off after I charged it, but knowing that it was likely not the case. The next morning I was disappointed, it was in fact not a Kindle situation. Never before had I actually wanted to be an influencer but at that moment, I really wanted to tweet/X/thread(?), to Fuji asking for advice or more information or an emergency backup.
All this to say that for the third time (and actually only time), I have no Barcelona photos to share. Not even iPhone photos because my phone is chronically out of storage. You’re going to have to go for yourselves.