PhotoEspaña, Spain's leading festival of photography, officially opened in Madrid this month, with nearly 100 exhibitions set to showcase the work of more than 300 visual artists across the capital and the country by September. Under the overarching theme of reimagining, the exhibitions feature both major figures in Spanish and international photography and emerging artists.
Alejandro Cartagena: The US-Mexico Border
Fundación Mapfre hosts an expansive overview of Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena, including three series 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, "There's this obsession with being separate, being two different cultures."
The effects of separation are devastating. "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," Cartagena says. "Who am I? Who are the people that live around me? Who are we as Mexicans? Who are we as Americans? And this physicality of the wall basically erases us and we become generic, we become no one."
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—were 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 nods to the physical effects: "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
Lux and Umbra, a retrospective of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen at the Fernán Gómez centre, explores a career marked by restless eclecticism. Influenced by a childhood in Kenya, fashion design, and surrealism, Sassen's work defies easy categorisation. Themes of death, sexuality, and mourning recur on strictly ambiguous terms. The umbra, or shadow, appears as abstract or representational, staged or natural, literal or metaphorical.
Rafał Milach: Protest Photography at Circulo de Bellas Artes
Polish photographer Rafał Milach's strident exhibition at Circulo de Bellas Artes explores the disruptive potential of engaged documentary practice. Avowing that "protest photography is quite boring visually, it always looks the same," Milach directs his energies toward making work accessible 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 feature as means of strengthening solidarity networks and encouraging opposition.
Reimagining: A Diverse Group Show
PhotoEspaña takes its theme from Reimagining, a group show of 13 projects by photographers exploring varied approaches. Txema Salvans' The Wreckage of a Catastrophe takes a caustic look at life on the road, no longer a symbol of prosperity. 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 photographs empty billboards advertising their own obsolescence and the transition to the digital era.
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 travelled with a team, large format camera, and backdrop, sometimes taking two days to complete a portrait. Frank arrived unannounced with a Leica 35mm, working swiftly. Despite differences, both projects achieved fullest expression in book form and testified to an American reality that no amount of rhetoric could disguise.
