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This article studies Spanish photographer Juan Valbuena’s Salitre series as a contemporary representation of blackness in Spain. From 2009 to 2014 Valbuena worked with a group of Senegalese immigrants who lived together in an overcrowded apartment known as a piso patera in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighborhood to create a multi-volume photographic archive of their lives. The series is comprised of thirteen books in total- the twelve authored by the inhabitants of the piso patera, and a final contextual volume created by Valbuena himself. This article analyzes the images shared by the men in their personal volumes, with particular attention to Nicole Fleetwood’s concept of non-iconicity. It ends with a reading of Valbuena’s thirteenth book, as the contents of his intervention in a purportedly self-representative project provide a stark contrast to the previous twelve volumes. Namely, the article argues that while the twelve individually authored volumes show some exercise of what Nicholas Mirzoeff terms counter-visuality, Valbuena’s efforts to explain and define for his audience undermine these interventions.
