Catalá-Roca took his fist picture at the age of seven and began to learn the craft from his father Pere Catalá i Pic.

From an early age, Francesc had the privilege of seeing pictures and exhibitions by leading photographers. He was thus able to perfect his technique and acquire a culture beggage that opened up new perspective. He collaborated with his father on producing several collages, and he also did a few himself. Simply by working, he began to be slective, to know what he wanted to do and what he would never do. It was inusual before the second quarter of the twentieth century, to come across a photographer who did not want to be a painter. He perfected his craft and made it his profession, and he lived be it and for it.

After the Spanish Civil War, during Franco's Dictatorship, Catalá-Roca travelled extensively throughout Spain; he was an eye witness to the changes that slowly transformed the country; and he frequented groups of artists and intellectuals, who influenced him and on whom he too had an influence.

In his photographs, Catalá-Roca reflected on the period and the events through which he lived, and was very act of an image to inform.

Catalá-Roca creates a new awareness of photography. His images re-establish the harmony between the perceiver and the very act of pereicing. He achieves this balance through his highly personal aesthetic, -angles of vision, framings inherited from the classical avant-gardes.- and through his imperative need to inform us of time passing inexorably and of memory.

A repository of the images of his era, Catalá-Roca's vision offers these images to us after they have been filtered byhis view oh the world, a filter that does not interfere in his ethical desie to stand aside, as it were, without either altering or dostorting the information provided.

Fifty years of Spanish life are seen and experienced by the photographer and acknowledged in his photographs.