Fifty steps from Barcelona Cathedral, in the small Plaça d’Isidre Nonell, there is a wall that everyone wants to stand in front of. It is Joan Fontcuberta’s photomosaic El món neix en cada besada, The World Begins With Every Kiss, made in 2014 from thousands of small photographs that people sent in of their own moments of freedom. Up close you see the tiles; from a few steps back they dissolve, and two enormous mouths meet in a kiss.
On 29 October I walked past with my Leica Q3 and found a queue. Not for a museum or a bar, but for the wall. There must have been more than a hundred people in a square that isn’t very big, all waiting their turn to be photographed with the kiss. Everyone was photographing everyone. Friends directed friends, couples swapped phones, strangers photographed other strangers being photographed. I stayed five or ten minutes and did exactly what everyone else was doing.
Then two young women took their turn and made the most of it. They didn’t just pose, they performed, twice and for quite a while, as their friends photographed them and plenty of us joined in uninvited. I have more than twenty frames of them. This is the one where everything lines up: one on each side of the mouths, a leg kicked up behind them at the same moment, as if the kiss on the wall were theirs.
What I like about it is that it is a picture of a picture being made. Out of frame are the friends with their phones, the queue, the other photographers, and me. Fontcuberta built the mural out of other people’s photographs, and it keeps producing more of them every day. Not everyone is happy about that: earlier this year neighbours in the square asked for it to be removed because of the crowds. But for a few seconds two strangers turned a monument to freedom into a stage, and the wall did exactly what it was made to do.
Leica Q3 · 28mm · Barcelona, October 2026
You can see more of my work at bclphoto.com and on Instagram at @bclphoto_.
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