Xavier Ribas documents the phenomenon of row houses, urban groupings of similar shapes which rise up on the outskirts of cities across Spain. Entire colonies, which have sprouted up in the advancing wave of the demographic and economic explosion of the metropolis, ceaselessly push out the limits of the city to join a landscape that is closer to a movie set than it is to a domestic reality.

Xavier Ribas was born in 1960 in Barcelona. After studies in anthropology at the University of Barcelona, he trained as a photographer at the Newport School of Art and Design in Newport, Wales. His photography has been shown in numerous exhibitions, among them the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Salamanca (2002), at the most recent Biennale d'art contem-porain de Lyon, in France, at IMAGO'01 in Salamanca, and at the Encontros da Imagem in Braga, Portugal (1999). Since 2000, he has been teaching at the University of Brighton.