The virtual exhibition Madrid Missed (May 26-June 30) collects 21 photographs that have been part of the coverage that the reporter Luis de Vega (Huelva, 1971) has carried out during these weeks of pandemic as a member of the Local section of EL PAÍS. There is Pablo coming out of his mother’s womb; Ricardo, the aircraft disinfector; Armenia and its homemade mask; José Manuel, the homeless; Eva, the committed mayor or Riay in her coffin.
The exhibition, which will soon feature the edition of a catalog to complement its virtual format, was born from a joint initiative of the Cervantes Institute headquarters in Brussels and in Budapest. “Where the roads cross says the song. The city that welcomes those who are always passing through. The one on Gran Vía, a seafront without a sea. The anteroom of heaven. Titles of what is now another Madrid. The one in which the people of Madrid do not crowd their streets, but are hanging on their balconies, like caged birds, “wrote the exhibition’s curator, Roberto Villalón, director of the magazine Nailing.
Along with the faces and stories of the protagonists of the reports, the exhibition also includes some pictures of that empty Madrid, sad and also infected by the pandemic. With Spain as one of the centers of this world crisis, “we needed to reflect that moment in our cultural program. Not to alarm but to show. And to reflect on what cultural creation will be like afterwards with this scar ”, he points out Javier Valdivielso, director of the Cervantes Institute in Budapest.
“Luis de Vega’s work denotes an ethical commitment to reality. They are honest, immediate photographs, without any artifice that invite us to reflect on the new disease, its metaphors and concrete effects in everyday life and the need to learn a new emotional lexicon, ”he understands. Ana Vázquez, director in Brussels. “Madrid Missed It also shows us the plasticity of the city, multiplying its perspectives. It gives us a renewed perception of the city that, before the pandemic, we perceived from routine and an absent-minded gaze, and that now, through these images and what we have lived, promotes estrangement and returns us to experience, to the field of discovery, to the surprise and the experience of a new urban narrative, of a different city ”.
For Villalón “documentary photography, photojournalism, despite everything, is still a great tool that allows us to tell the world, know it and understand it.” These photos “help us understand what we are experiencing here and now in the face of a global event, such as this pandemic. And they will serve to remember him in the future. ”
“When we think of past epidemics like the Spanish flu, photography returns. Those black and white photographs are the ones that best describe what that was. Now we need to demand a photojournalism that narrates and counts our epidemic, “argues Valdivielso. “Because life goes on, albeit in a different way, beyond curves and figures,” concludes the exhibition curator.
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