A sunny Sunday, half past eleven in the morning. The Barrio Chino of Valencia, in the middle of the city. Pedestrians own the street. It is a busy, dark place where prostitutes and pimps live alongside shopkeepers, street musicians and craftsmen; a place of movement where the curious and the nosy of every kind come to fill their eyes and satisfy their appetites.

It is Father's Day, and men crowd the pavements, following with a covetous eye the bodies on show under the arcades. Collado came to bear witness with his camera to that greedy air, knowing that at this hour the four old dirty streets that make up the perverse centre of the city will be full of people watching for the spring of the flesh.

He walks discreetly, pretending to be a tourist, hiding the Nikon he carries so that nobody notices he has come to steal a piece of their secret lives; as he moves he coughs to cover the small detonations of the shutter, and tries to miss nothing of the human spectacle. Forty-two years old, an amateur, he went into the forbidden zone with very clear intentions. He does not know that others have done the same before him in Paris or in Barcelona. It does not matter: his eye is his own. In 1972 he lives the city as a true idler, a pavement-treader who explores with his camera the stories there are to tell, while Valencia is stuck in the lethargy of a dictatorship that has lasted far too long.