‘Gracias por su visita’ is a collaboration between photographer Joseph Fox and graphic designer Lizzie Frost.
After moving from London to Madrid in 2017, they became enamoured with the small neighbourhood bars they found in every corner of the city. It wasn’t only due to the mixture of people that frequent them, of all ages and backgrounds, to share a pincho, a caña or a vermut, but also the atmosphere and decor that felt so much more alive and rooted in Spanish tradition and culture than the generic coffee shops popping up around them. These bars became not just refuges from the intense heat, but arteries to transport them into the day-to-day beat of a new city. From their newly adopted ritual of tomando unas cañas emerged a compulsion to photograph the ever-present pinchos de tortilla as a way of interaction, reflection and documentation of an overlooked quotidian experience, that in recent years has become threatened by a combination of rising rents, changing tastes and globalisation. This elemental dish, captured against the worn surfaces of tile, marble and wood veneer that echo through each photograph, provides the perfect antidote to the sculpted images of Instagram; focussing on the Spanish tortilla de patata as a symbol of Spain’s fiercely defended food culture in a city caught politically and stylistically between the old world and the new.