Pol · Barcelona

The origins

The first camera was a Zenith at Encants de Barcelona for almost nothing. Pol was 15 years old and didn't know much about photography, but something about that mechanical object caught his attention. It was completely manual, required understanding how light worked, and the results were unpredictable.

What started as curiosity became a systematic obsession. The Zenith led to a Praktika, then a Nikon F, then a Leica. Each camera opened a new chapter in the history of photography — a history that Pol began to understand not through books, but through handling the objects themselves.

Walter and the workshop

The decisive encounter was with Walter, a camera repairman who had worked in a photography shop in the 70s and 80s. Walter didn't just teach Pol how to clean lenses or fix shutters — he transmitted a way of relating to mechanical objects. Patience. Rigor. Respect for what's in front of you.

In Walter's workshop, Pol learned to open cameras without breaking them, to diagnose a misaligned rangefinder, to replace the fabric curtains of a Leica IIIc. Knowledge that can't be found in any manual and that takes years of practice to acquire.

Aquiles and the European markets

Aquiles was an antique dealer who had been going to European antique markets for decades: Portobello in London, Saint-Ouen in Paris, fairs in Germany and the Netherlands. He introduced Pol to a circuit of collectors and dealers that few people in Spain knew about.

Those trips changed the nature of the collection. The cameras stopped being just interesting objects and became historical documents. Each piece comes from a specific place and time, passes through specific hands, and tells a story that goes beyond the technical specifications.

The collection today

~400 cameras. From the 1888 Photosphere to 1990s compacts. Soviet cameras from the Cold War, American prototypes that never reached the market, German precision cameras from the 50s, Japanese rangefinders from the era of professional photojournalism.

The collection is not a museum — it's a living archive. New pieces arrive, some leave, others are restored. The goal is never completeness but understanding: understanding how photography evolved, how different industrial and political contexts produced radically different objects, how each camera reflects the values of its time.