This week the annual Revela-T festival has once again taken over Vilasser de Dalt to celebrate contemporary analogue photography. The festival has an excellent mix of exhibitions, workshops and a small photographic market.

The exhibitions are extremely well curated and there are excellent guided tours which are often aided by the presence and commentary of the original artist. The works span projects undertaken in Vilasser de Dalt itself (notably an excellent large format portrait project documenting the former workers of the textile mills that now make up some of the civic venues in the town) through to international exhibits such as Munemasa Takahashi‘s moving Lost and Found project.

The material covers a huge range of different photographic styles and techniques, from pin-hole to large format, and more exotic forms such as wet-plate, tin-type and cyanotype photography. If you are looking for photographic inspiration, this is the place to come to – not least because there are also workshops that can teach many of these techniques.

Dangerously, there is also a small market selling prints, films and analogue cameras ranging from vintage large formats to the current series of Fuji Instax cameras. Fortunately, I have all the cameras I need right now and the fridge already has about a years supply of film and chemicals (but then who needs food?).

Photography for me has been quite difficult in the last 18 months, and Revela-T was a wonderful reminder as to why photography matters and just how many creative possibilities there are. I met numerous people who were without exception refreshingly warm, friendly and enthusiastic. This was a much needed counterpoint to the terribly jaded view of humanity that Barcelona has been delivering so unrelentingly of late.

And, somewhat off-topic, I made the mistake of buying a unusual second-hand tri-colour filter which yielded some wonderfully weird looking images from the subsequent walk down to the railway station. These images have no place whatsoever in this blog post, but I include them because they perhaps give a better sense of my mood after having seen to the festival than any words could:

Revela-T is open until Sunday 28th May, and full information and travel details can be found on their web site. Vilasser del Dalt is just short journey north of Barcelona, and can be reached by bus from central Barcelona.

All images here were taken at the festival with the newly repaired M typ 262 (and yes, I know this is just plain wrong at an analogue festival…). A Zeiss ZM 1,5/50 C-Sonnar lens was abused with an ND filter to gratuitously shoot wide open.