This year’s edition of PhotoEspaña, a festival in Madrid that began in 1998, turns the entire city into a spotlight on the photographic medium. This time around the stated emphasis is on Spanish photography (to be followed, in subsequent years, by Latin American and then European practitioners), and the event runs the gamut from bleeding-edge digital experimentation to elegant images made at the very beginning of the 20th century. The program of exhibitions makes clear how we’ve moved from an initial fascination with photography’s potential — what it can do — and toward a more restless eagerness to find out what can be done to it. Here are a few of the many highlights, on view through July 27.
“Photography 2.0” at Circulo de Bellas Artes
Curated by Joan Fontcuberta, this group show of 20 artists aims to draw a rough map of some of the major territories that photography has explored in recent years. As one might expect, found imagery, digital manipulation, and chance-based operations are paramount. Laia Abril’s disturbingly effective installation, “Thinspiration,” is composed of self-portraits posted on pro-anorexic websites. Across from it hangs Daniel Mayrit’s 100-piece grid of media images depicting the 100 top British powerbrokers, as determined by Square Mile magazine. (He was unable to locate any images of Jonathan Sorrell, of the Man hedge fund group, and so one frame in the grid is left blank.) Another discovery: hometown talent Miguel Ángel Tornero, who presented a series of photographs taken in Berlin, Rome, and Madrid. Disparate images are joined together using a digital camera’s “panorama” function, resulting in bizarre, yet oddly plausible, urban landscapes. “I like their relationship to the subconscious life,” Tornero said, noting that as a photographer he prefers to approach his surroundings “as a newborn, as if it’s the first time I’m seeing things.”
“P2P: Contemporary Practice in Spanish Photography,” at Fernan Gomez Centro Cultural de la Villa
Curated by Charlotte Cotton and Luis Diaz, this group show is a sympathetic companion piece of sorts to “Photography 2.0.” Some of the artists featured in the latter show make an appearance here, including Tornero (whose installation is more sculptural than photographic) and Mayrit (whose inclusion is a conceptual piece that visually expresses the most popular words used in King Juan Carlos’s annual Christmas speeches).Tanit Plana’s eye-popping trio of images from “Don Dinero” focuses on “a lexicon of fears, doubts, and taboos around money,” resulting in a sort of cash-fetish pornography. Olmo González arrays personal, enigmatic photographs — of dental procedures, asses being grabbed, apples, moles, egg yolk — creating a photo-mural that acts as a diffuse portrait of a lover. And Alejandro Marote experiments with purely abstract, color-centric photography that owes a debt to David Benjamin Sherry, illustrating his concept with a poem that pits “Red against blue / Until they touch and friction occurs / Until the skeleton black / Until the symbol.” A bit heavy-handed, perhaps, but it works.
Josep Renau, at Circulo de Bellas Artes
The focus here is a series of photomontages made by this Spanish artist between the early ’50s and mid ’60s. Titled (with a wink and sneer) “The American Way of Life,” they form a counter-narrative of the United States: a cesspool of racism, sexual excess, and emaciated children. The series’s barbed critique looks as fresh as ever, from the piece depicting a bare-chested woman walking down the aisle with a machine-headed groom to a collage equating the choice between Democrats and Republicans as akin to the one between Coke and Pepsi. Renau pushes the most buttons when he tackles race, as in “Happy End” (a couple kisses in the foreground while a lynched man hangs from a tree overheard) and “Racial Orgasm” (a skull exploding with images of beaten bodies and KKK members tending to a burning cross).
“Mapping the Blind Spot” at Fundacion Lazaro Galdiano
A Polish photo collective (Sputnik) meets a Spanish photo collective (NOPHOTO); the two collaborate, intermingle, confuse, cross-pollinate, and produce a beautiful (free) publication. The Xeroxed map provided at the entrance seems to give up when it comes to properly identifying which photos came from which of the two groups, and partly, that’s the point: a Frankenstein aesthetic, collage by way of juxtaposition, layering, and inventive hanging.
Xavier Mulet at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales
While it seems like a schtick — the photographer assuming the identity of a mid 19th-century explorer named M. Ardan and creating faux-vintage “documentary” photos using archaic development processes — Mulet’s project wins points for being sited in the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, without any clear wall labels identifying it as a fiction. Part of the fun is watching other museumgoers examining these romantic ambrotypes, cyanotypes, and collodian prints as if they were authentic historical documents. The final picture in the series is a tip-off to the underlying artifice: We see M. Ardan posed with his beloved horse, Shams.
“Photobooks. Spain 1905-1977” at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
This exhaustively researched exhibition (whose catalog is worth splurging on in the gift shop) tracks the development of photographs published in book form. The range of material — political, personal, didactic, experimental — is impressive, as the exhibition climbs from early 20th-century books capturing iconic “types” of people in rural Spain to Jordi Vargas’s 1977 book of photos snapped in the British punk scene (oddly similar bookends, in a way, as curator Horacio Fernandez pointed out).
“Best Photobooks of the Year” at Biblioteca Nacional de Espana
Unlike at the aforementioned Reina Sofía, which is very much framed-and-behind-glass, the tomes here are free to have their pages flipped. Give yourself ample time to linger over the roughly one hundred nominees for this year’s prize, whose highlights include “The Waiting Game” by Txema Salvans, “Holy Bible” by Broomberg & Chanarin, and Christopher Anderson's “Stump” — extreme close-ups of vitriolic Republican politicians on the campaign trail.
Cristina de Middel at La New Gallery, through July 20
While this show is not part of the official PhotoEspaña itinerary, de Middel also has work in “P2P,” and the inventively-designed, book-length version of this series is on view in the prize exhibition above. The artist combines photographs taken in China with altered pages of Mao’s so-called Little Red Book. “Censored” excerpts from the text result in very different meanings (as in the exhibition’s title, “If there is to be a revolution... there must be a party”). The gold-framed diptychs waver between the poetic and the perverse: An image of a leaf balanced on its edge with the text “under no circumstances must we relax”; a man singing karaoke in an Abraham Lincoln T-shirt, next to the phrase “a sound system” (truncated from the original “from now on, a sound system of Party committee meetings...”). De Middel’s work is refreshing and often hilarious; she manages to drop into a country and a history not her own, creating an idiosyncratic alternate reality ruled by absurdist politics.
