La Nuu
International Photography Festival of Rubí
The contemporary photography festival of Rubí, La Nuu, frees photography from enclosed spaces and spreads it through the streets of the city. There are no rooms or display cases: the works are printed on giant banners and hung on squares and façades. The result is a festival you walk through on foot, one that lets you look at contemporary photography with the same freedom with which you look at the city.
Rubí is half an hour from Barcelona and yet feels like another world. La Nuu — the international photography festival led by Carles Mercader and his team — brings bold, author-driven proposals there: established names and emerging artists, historical archives and digital experiments, all mixed together and within reach of anyone passing by.
The format: photography in the street
La Nuu does not lock photography inside an exhibition hall. The works are reproduced at large scale and installed in public space, so that both the people who come on purpose and the locals of Rubí who happen to walk past can enjoy them. The festival also includes guided tours in which the artists — almost all of them — explain their work first-hand.
Our view
We first poked our heads in during 2025, invited by some photographer friends, and we were struck by the festival’s ability to bring the most avant-garde photography to a general audience without giving anything up or falling into posturing. We returned in 2026, with the same crew and rain overhead, because the format — the city as a gallery, the guided tour as the narrative — does not wear off on the first visit.
We are not photographing live performances here. We are photographing culture: the act of looking, the banners in dialogue with the façades, the people discovering an image without knowing it was there. And always by the same rule: document without interrupting.
Editions documented on the blog
2025
2026
