A Look Inside PHotoEspaña 2017
In 20 years, PHotoEspaña has managed to become an internationally-renowned stomping ground for groundbreaking photographers, the world over.
Started in 1998, PHotoEspaña was created in order to give photography more of a voice within the international arts community. Since then, festival has become one of Spain’s – and the world’s – most iconic cultural events, with more than 100 exhibitions and over 500 artists being presented in 62 museums, galleries and art centres around the country.
The 20th edition of PHotoEspaña – running from Thursday 31 May to Saturday 27 August 2017 – will help shine a light on how photography can help to raise awareness through image. The incredibly diverse lineup being shown at this year’s festival paint a stunning picture of modern photography’s breadth and talent.
The festival is divided into the Official Section, which includes institutions, museums and large exhibition centres, and the Madrid Off Festival, which features art galleries and other venues. In addition to the festival’s exhibitions, there will be professional activities throughout the first week that will help fledgling photographers earn a leg up. Portfolio sessions will bring attendees together with national and international experts, and photography workshops will broach subjects such as “The Limits of the Photographic Act”.
National Photography Prizewinner Alberto García-Alix has helped craft a “carte blanche” in which the photographer has brought together six exhibitions and one activity. Under the title “The Exaltation of the Human Being”, García-Alix has gathered six “heterodox” artists: Anders Petersen, Paulo Nozolino, Antoine d’Agata, Pierre Molinier, Karlheinz Weinberger and Teresa Margolles, the main features of six exhibitions located at venues throughout Madrid, and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin at separate events.
Swedish photographer Anders Petersen will be making a splash at PHotoEspaña with his photographs depicting customers at the Café Lehmitz, a Hamburg bar that the artist discovered in 1967. The patrons – including prostitutes, pimps, transvestites and other unusual customers – make up the characters in a collection that is both unorthodox and reflective of the human condition.
At Petersen’s PHotoEspaña exhibition this year, spectators will have the opportunity to see the full extent of his Café Lehmitz archive. Besides the project’s original photo negatives, Petersen is putting on display the stories and relationships that came together in the book that he published in 1977, which has since earned worldwide acclaim.
100 years of Leica photography will be on display in an exhibition entitled “With Eyes Wide Open”. The showing, made up of over 300 photographs from artists like Cartier-Bresson, F.C. Gundlach, Fred Herzog, Elisabeth and Robert Capa, tells the story of photography’s evolution from 35mm until today.
When the Leica camera was launched in 1925, photography was changed forever. Light, portable, and easy to handle, the Leica provided a new level of ease for photographers to transport their camera, adding a more on-the-go element to photography that before, due to unwieldy equipment, was simply impractical. PHotoEspaña’s exhibition will be split into several sections chronicling the evolution of photography over the past century: photojournalism from the 1930s to the 1950s and colour photography from the 1960s to the 1990s are a few of the chapters on display.
Elliot Erwitt’s Cuba is an exhibition that is also influenced by its share of history. Erwitt’s first visit Cuba in 1964 saw the Magnum Agency photographer take historic images of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro for Newsweek. In 2015, more than 50 years later, he finally returned to Cuba, aged 87, to see how the country and its citizens had changed.
Cuba will bring together images from both the 1960s and more recently, including photographs that run parallel to the country’s birth of a new political and social system, as well as updated reflections of what it means to live in Cuba today. The collection will be paired with the announcement of the inaugural Elliott Erwitt Havana Club 7 Fellowship, which will be awarded to a documentary photographer that will then travel to Cuba to create their own piece of work, chronicling their depiction of the country and its current condition.
Though PHotoEspaña is an international event, it is Spanish at heart. Some of the many institutions that are participating in the festival include the Casa de América, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Círculo de Bellas Artes, Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Fundación Telefónica, Fundación Canal, Centro Cultural de la Villa, Real Jardín Botánico and the Prado Museum, among others.
This year, 36 venues will participate in PHotoEspaña’s Madrid Off Festival, which will see its own unique display of talented and eclectic artists.
Exhibitions will include “In Pain”, a collection of four Polaroid photographs from Nobuyoshi Araki that explore the possibilities of pain as manifested through art. The pictures evoke the work of visual artist Fernando Bayona, and broach the notion of harm as an aesthetic entity.
“Construtio. 3/30” is a unique project that will present three contemporary photographs from three different decades – 25, 30 and 40 years old – who are at different stages of their careers. In this project, the three artists work together to create a single collection that provides a space for them to share their creative difficulties and compare the artistic process as it evolves throughout life.
Another groundbreaking showing in the Madrid Off Festival is “Lake Verea”, an assortment of images that capture the moment when a viewer is faced with a building’s architectural history, as well as the people who live inside it. As the photographer has approached houses spontaneously and without permission, the viewer is faced with an emotional and uninhibited look into the characteristics of buildings and their inhabitants.
From Pierre Molinier, the late and acclaimed French artist, comes “Ce fut un homme sans moralité”, an intimate look at sexuality and pleasure. In this collection Molinier pushed the boundaries of voyeurism, presenting roughly 40 photographs and photomontages that delve into a sexually-charged universe replete with fetishism and cross-dressing.
Molinier was a painter by trade who turned his dissatisfaction towards his own body, as well as the dissolution of his personality, into art. This selection, dating back to the 1960s, offers viewers an uncensored view of Molinier’s sexuality, which included time spent as a transvestite.
In “Loaded Shine”, Portuguese photographer Paulo Nozolino meditates on the idea of absence and its place in photography. The series of 20 photographs – produced between 2008 and 2013 in Lisbon, New York, Paris, Berlin and the French and Portuguese countrysides – include vertical compositions in which the horizon becomes obscured and details become muddy.
At PHotoEspaña 2017, there will be a notable focus on equality and gender, with a group of artists honing in on the world today and what is happening around the globe.
“Dance Floors”, a series by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, portrays the lives of transgender sex workers living in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where a bloody drug war has split the city in two. By placing her subjects within the barren spaces previously occupied by the nightclubs where they used to work, Margolles has offered a look into the hellish life that they go through on a daily basis, with discrimination, exclusion and hate crimes being the norm.
Another humanistic exhibition is “They, We, You” by Argentinean photographer Adriana Lestido. The showing, including work amassed over more than 30 years, focuses on the fundamentals of womanhood: women with their daughters, female prisoners, adolescent mothers and children are the key subjects. Though her early works are influenced by photojournalism, her later photographs show a more subjective side, as her emotions become evident in the pictures themselves. Through these black and white images, Lestido documents the beauty of human relations and the ideas that they evoke, such as love, motherhood and solitude.
If these artists are any indication, PHotoEspaña 2017 is sure to be a monumental event. As the show progresses, fluoro will be bringing you highlights and notable news. Stay tuned to our social networks for more information.
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