Digital projects join PHotoESPAÑA 2020

Madrid, 06/11/2020

So far the most atypical edition of PHotoESPAIN It will start on June 25 and will last until October 31. Despite the difficulties, and progressively during those months, its programming will be extended to various Spanish cities and will also incorporate, for the first time in the Festival’s history, digital projects.

Fifty exhibitions will reach cities across the country, highlighting the potential of photography as an element of communication and social cohesion in these difficult months of forced distances. The proposals from Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, Alcobendas, Barcelona, ​​Santander and Zaragoza will continue to constitute the heart of PHE and will bring together international and Spanish authors, young and established.

One of the incentives of this next chapter of PHotoESPAÑA will be the unfolding of the fruits of the initiative # PHEdesdemibalcón: a collective portrait in 50 Spanish cities. Precisely with it the appointment will start: on the balconies and windows of our cities you can see a selection of images submitted to the call: in approximately a month and a half, 63,000 photos have been added to Instagram.

# PHEdesdemibalcón emerged as an invitation to citizens to express the experiences and hopes of their confinement through images taken from their balconies and windows. These have continued to be, as so many times throughout Art History, instruments to explore creativity and imagination and also to share individual views of a situation that has posed collective challenges. Municipalities were invited to join the project by organizing exhibitions in their cities, outdoors, with the images of their neighbors, and fifty of them have collected the witness: those from A Coruña, Albacete, Alcalá de Henares, Alcobendas, Alicante, Badajoz, Barcelona, ​​Burgos, Cáceres, Cartagena, Castellón, Córdoba, Coslada, Cuenca, Elche, Getafe, Gijón, Girona, Granada, Guadalajara, Hervás, Hospitalet de Llobregat, Ibiza, Jaén, Las Palmas, Logroño, León, Madrid , Melilla, Muxía, Ourense, Oviedo, Pamplona, ​​Salamanca, San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Santander, Segovia, Seville, Soria, Teruel, Toledo, Torrevieja, Valladolid, Valencia, Vigo, Vitoria, Zamora and Zaragoza.

JAPAN, NORTH AMERICA, HUMAN BODY AND FASHION
As for the Official Section of the Festival, which will have its axis in Madrid, it will consist of group shows with national and international proposals. Among the protagonists, Japanese photography from the 50s, the authors’ visions of the human body or the views of great photographers on art and fashion.

Centro Centro will receive one of the most relevant European photography collections for the exhibition “Between art and fashion. Photographs from the Carla Sozzani collection ”; It will also be the first time that these funds are presented in Spain. We will see images of Richard Avedon, Berenice Abbott, Moholy Nagy, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Helmut Newton, Francesca Woodman, Man Ray or Vivian Sassen, among others. Gathered by the publisher over the past four decades, these works shape her personal vision of the world and also of femininity and beauty.

The Per Amor al´Art collection by Bombas Gens will arrive at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, in the exhibition “The gaze of things. Japanese photography around Provoke ”, a great opportunity to complete the tour of the exhibition dedicated to Daido Moriyama that has now reopened the Foto Colectania Foundation. The one of Bombas Gens is one of the most important collections of Japanese photography between 1957 and 1972 that is conserved outside Japan and includes the renewal movement that developed in the country at a stage marked by the social confrontation against the American heritage of the occupation. We will find works by Ikkō Narahara, Shōmei Tōmatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Akira Satō, Kikuji Kawada, Yutaka Takanashi, Takuma Nakahira or the aforementioned Moriyama.

The Canal Foundation, for its part, will host a group of photographers from the Magnum agency in “The observed body.” Its theme center will be the human body, a recurring inspiration for Eve Arnold, Alec Soth, Philippe Halsman, Herbert List, Susan Meiselas, Werner Bischof, Antoine d’Agata, Bieke Depoorter, Bruce Gilden or Cristina García Rodero.

The MAPFRE Foundation will present, within the framework of PHotoESPAÑA, three exhibitions at its headquarters in Madrid and Barcelona. In the Catalan capital, he will show us the production of Paul Strand, promoter of street photography, with whom he will open his new photography center in the city. In addition, it will gather five decades of images of the British Bill Brandt. Already in Madrid, the Foundation will present a sample of more than 350 images of the American Lee Friedlander, from series such as American monument to more current ones.

And contemporary North American photography will also be the protagonist of the ICO Museum exhibition at PHE. It will offer, for the first time in Madrid and in full, the project The destruction of lower Manhattan, by Danny Lyon, one of the greatest photographic essays of the 20th century. It must be remembered that, from 1967, Lyon documented the demolition of the streets of old Manhattan, so that his works connect with the affiliation of this center with architecture.

Casa de América, for its part, will host the project “Black Antarctica”, by the Argentinean Adriana Lestido, a work of exterior and interior exploration resulting from the photographer’s expedition to Antarctica eight years ago. This same venue will host “More roads”, by the Cuban María Magdalena Campos Pons, and precisely the new voices of contemporary Cuban photography will meet in the exhibition of the photographers selected in the views of the portfolios of Trasatlántica Cuba, held last October in the Havana Photo Library.

Casa Árabe will also host two exhibitions: “Displacements. Yemen Diasporas ”, which will bring together the works of Shaima Al Tamimi and Thana Faroq, photographers of Yemeni origin who crudely portray the effects of displacement on people’s identity and biography; and “Arcadia arabica”, by Jordi Esteva, with images of the five great oases of Egypt and Socotra, the island of Sinbad el Marino.

Chema Madoz’s “The Nature of Things” also takes part in the PHotoESPAÑA 2020 program in the Royal Botanical Garden.

Contemporary Spanish photography will also star. The Museo Lázaro Galdiano will show, in collaboration with the Museo de Navarra, the most controversial works by Koldo Chamorro in “El santo Christo ibérico”, an unadorned portrait of the uses and customs of rural Spain in the 1970s and 1980s.

Tabacalera, meanwhile, will host one of Masats’ most remembered works, “Visit Spain”, a unique document in which he turned his gaze to Spain in the 1950s and 1960s, a period in which Francoism tried to open up to the world presenting its kindest face.

Hand in hand with the Lafuente Archive, the Circulo de Bellas Artes will host the exhibition “Madrid, the streets of rhythm”, by Miguel Trillo, photographer responsible for iconic fanzines of the Movida, such as Rockocó, alleys and avenues and Madrid, the streets of rhythm that put a face to hundreds of anonymous who were the soul of this cultural and social movement.

In the Canal de Isabel II Room we will visit “Where the maps fold”, by Juan Valbuena, which will account for five of his projects from 1999 to the unpublished Dalind. This photographer is a member of the Nophoto collective and in his production the human being, the photography and the territory are intertwined in narrations that the public can complete.

The portraits of the Transition from the perspective of Alberto Schommer will arrive at the Cerralbo Museum in “Contemporaries”, a compendium of faces from culture, politics and the arts captured from humor and psychological depth, and the National Museum of Romanticism will study, in “Dissonance”, the revolutions in the context of Spanish Romanticism from the work of Alicia Martín.

Javier Riera, for his part, will occupy the Plaza de Colón and the façade of Fernán Gómez with Project the return, an installation that will combine video and photography to recreate human yearnings in a society that often occupies and consumes spaces without critically paying attention to them.

PHotoESPAÑA 2020 will also have invited venues. Heli Blafield’s work will be presented at the Iberoamerican Institute of Finland, who traveled throughout that Nordic country studying its deeply rooted saunas.

The Institute of Mexico will exhibit “Every line is a route, every route leads to a point”, by Emilio Rojas, a new reflection on two common concerns of the photographer: the effects of post-colonialism and borders. And the Royal Photographic Society will host Juanjo Albarrán’s “Ritual May”, a reflection on the rebirth of life that, from time immemorial, spring implies.

Other venues of the Festival will be Alcalá de Henares, Alcobendas and Zaragoza in PHotoESPAÑA. The Convent of Santa María La Rica in Alcalá will host the exhibition “Poetic Realism”, by Piedad Isla, a very rich document from rural Spain in the 1950s and 1960s by this pioneer of photographic neorealism in our country.

Alcobendas will participate with five exhibitions. Salvador Allende Boulevard will host “Una [otra] way of looking ”, by José María Díaz – Maroto, a summary of the last twenty-five years of his career. The Alcobendas Art Center will show, in “Foto No Foto”, some of the funds of the Alcobendas Photography Collection and, in “Tradition and Attire”, will recover the work of Ortiz Echagüe, main representative of the so-called Generation of 98 of the Spanish photography. The new values ​​of the image will have their place in the exhibitions of Lilia Luganskaia, PHotoESPAÑA Discoveries Award 2019 for her work Research of love, and in the exhibition “Encounters in present time” of the Students of the PHotoESPAÑA Master.

In the Aragonese capital, in its History Center, we will see “De mud y luz” by Manuel Outumuro, a selection of portraits of great names in cinema and culture.

Starting in October, PHotoESPAÑA Santander will return, for the second time, with a program that will include the Official Section, invited venues, the involvement of the city’s galleries in the OFF Festival and activities for the public and professionals.

There are confirmed exhibitions by Ciuco Gutiérrez, Carmen Calvo, Juan Uslé, Rosell Messeguer, Jorge Yéregui, Jordi Socías and Eduardo Rivas, who will be some of the authors who will participate with individual exhibitions in spaces such as the Santander City Hall, the Central Library of Cantabria, the Image Documentation Center, the Embarcadero Palace or the Cabo Mayor Lighthouse Art Center. For its part, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Santander and Cantabria will once again present its funds in a collective at CASYC.

DIGITAL PHOTO-SPAIN
As for the online projects that, as we said, are premiered at the Festival, we have to talk about “Time stopped. Photographic memory of confinement ”. It will gather, with the collaboration of the ENAIRE Foundation, the work of forty photographers who will analyze the experience of confinement in our country through different perspectives and narrative voices. It is a collective proposal, in book format and also of the aforementioned digital exhibition, on the PHE website. Among the participants are Carlos Spottorno, Estela de Castro, Gianfranco Tripodo, Jorquera, Lurdes R. Basolí, Manu Bravo, Paola de Grenet, José Colón, Juan Millás, Judith Prat, Rafael Trapiello, Samuel Aranda and Anna Surinyach, among others.

The collected works are generally documentary in nature, but some will refer to dreams and longings. The public will be able to vote for the best work, which will receive a prize of 3,000 euros.

And yes, there will be an OFF Festival: this year it will not be limited to Madrid galleries and will have digital development. It will feature proposals from 105 galleries, which will present the work of one of their artists in a virtual exhibition on the festival page. Rooms from Alicante, Almagro, Barcelona, ​​Bilbao, Castellón, Gijón, Las Palmas, León, Madrid, Málaga, Oviedo, Palma de Mallorca, Santander, San Sebastián, Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Tenerife, Valencia and Zaragoza will be added.