PhotoEspaña, Spain's premier photography festival, officially opened in Madrid this month, with nearly 100 exhibitions scheduled across the country by September, showcasing the work of over 300 visual artists. The theme, loosely centered on reimagining, features both established figures in Spanish and international photography and emerging talents.
Alejandro Cartagena: The US-Mexico Border
Fundación Mapfre hosts a comprehensive retrospective of Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena, including three series focused on the US-Mexico border: Invisible Line, Between Borders, and Los Americanos. Cartagena describes the border wall as "potent, it shows its power all the time. Wherever you look, there's these jagged lines or these massive concrete walls that are cutting and showing that we are different." He adds, "One of the interesting or more poignant things of this experience was how the border, the wall, basically dissolves the idea of identity and personhood."
Laia Abril: Endometriosis at Museo del Romanticismo
Seven life-size portraits by Laia Abril are installed at the Museo del Romanticismo, exploring the debilitating effects of endometriosis. Her subjects—six women and a trans man—are photographed in postures they adopt to manage pain. "The idea was to visualise in real size," she says. "Their bodies in moments of pain, but also they were showing us what are the different positions they take when they try to have relief from that pain." The triptych presentation reflects the physical struggle: "It's kind of a fight between our body helping us to be resilient and fighting the pain, but also our body needs to be disconnected because it's carrying a lot of pain."
Viviane Sassen: Lux and Umbra Retrospective
At the Fernán Gómez centre, Lux and Umbra is a retrospective of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen, marked by restless eclecticism. Her childhood in Kenya and interest in fashion design and art history, particularly surrealism, inform a visual language that defies easy categorization. Themes of death, sexuality, and mourning recur on ambiguous terms, with the umbra (shadow) appearing as abstract or representational, staged or natural, literal or metaphorical.
Rafal Milach: Protest Photography at Circulo de Bellas Artes
Polish photographer Rafal Milach's exhibition at Circulo de Bellas Artes explores engaged documentary practice. Stating that "protest photography is quite boring visually, it always looks the same," Milach directs his work to new audiences via the Archive of Public Protests, a platform for photographs addressing social and political tensions in Poland and eastern Europe. Banners, murals, and free newspapers are featured as means of strengthening solidarity networks.
Reimagining: A Diverse Group Show
PhotoEspaña's theme is drawn from Reimagining, a group show of 13 projects. Txema Salvans' The Wreckage of a Catastrophe offers a caustic look at life on the road. Jon Gorospe's The Grid uses video and audio to examine commuting environments. Aleix Plademunt displays over 120 black-and-white photographs evoking a colonial gaze on rubber trees in the Peruvian rainforest. Eduardo Nave's Espacio Disponible, described as "the opposite of Times Square," photographs empty billboards advertising their own obsolescence.
Canonical Photobooks: Avedon and Frank
Two exhibitions pay homage to canonical photobooks: Richard Avedon's In the American West, 1979-1984 at Fundación Mapfre, and Robert Frank's The Americans at Espacio Fundación Telefónica. Avedon traveled with a large format camera and could take up to two days for a portrait, as with beekeeper Ronald Fischer. Frank preferred a Leica 35mm, working swiftly and moving on. Both projects achieved fullest expression in book form and testified to an American reality that rhetoric could not disguise.
Guy Lane travelled to Madrid as a guest of PhotoEspaña.
