{"id":488115,"date":"2026-06-21T07:28:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T07:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/488115\/"},"modified":"2026-06-21T07:28:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T07:28:08","slug":"from-the-us-mexico-border-to-protests-in-poland-highlights-of-photoespana-2026-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/488115\/","title":{"rendered":"From the US-Mexico border to protests in Poland: highlights of PhotoEspa\u00f1a 2026 | Photography"},"content":{"rendered":"

PhotoEspa\u00f1a, Spain\u2019s leading festival of photography, held its official opening in Madrid<\/a> this month and by September nearly 100 exhibitions will have showcased the work of more than 300 visual artists in the capital and across the country. Loosely corralled under the theme of reimagining, the exhibitions feature work by major figures in Spanish and international photography and less well-known emerging artists.<\/p>\n

Fundaci\u00f3n Mapfre<\/a> hosts an expansive overview of the career of the Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena, including three series he produced focusing on the effects and meaning of the US-Mexico border: Invisible Line, Between Borders and Los Americanos.<\/p>\n

Of the border wall he says: \u201cIt\u2019s potent, it shows its power all the time. Wherever you look, there\u2019s these jagged lines or these massive concrete walls that are cutting and showing that we are different. They are from the north, we are from the south and the cultures don\u2019t mix. There\u2019s this obsession with being separate, being two different cultures.\u201d<\/p>\n

The effects of separation can be devastating. \u201cOne of the interesting or more poignant things of this experience was how the border, the wall, basically dissolves the idea of identity and personhood,\u201d Cartagena says.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I\u2019m iterating on the same idea. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seven life-size portraits by Laia Abril are installed in an intimate show at the Museo del Romanticismo<\/a> exploring the debilitating effects of endometriosis. Her subjects, six women and a trans man, were photographed in the postures they adopt to manage their pain.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea was to visualise in real size\u201d, she says. \u201cTheir 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.\u201d Abril\u2019s portraits are taken from above in a reference to the almost out-of-body experiences she endures while coping with her own pain.<\/p>\n

The triptych presentation is a further nod to the physical effects of the condition. \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019s carrying a lot of pain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lux and Umbra<\/a>, a retrospective of the work of the Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen at the Fern\u00e1n G\u00f3mez centre, explores a career marked by a restless eclecticism. A childhood in Kenya and an interest in fashion design and art history with particular reference to surrealism all inform a visual language that defies easy categorisation.<\/p>\n

If certain themes, including death, sexuality and mourning, recur, they do so on strictly ambiguous terms. Even the umbra, or shadow, of the show\u2019s title has various meanings, appearing in her work as abstract or representational, staged or natural, literal or metaphorical.<\/p>\n

The Polish photographer Rafal Milach\u2019s strident exhibition at Circulo de Bellas Artes <\/a>explores the disruptive potential of an engaged documentary practice committed to outflanking traditional patterns of spectatorship.<\/p>\n

Avowing that \u201cprotest photography is quite boring visually, it always looks the same\u201d, Milach directs his energies towards making work accessible to new audiences via the Archive of Public Protests<\/a>, a platform for his and others\u2019 photographs addressing social and political tensions in Poland and eastern Europe. Banners, murals and free newspapers feature in the exhibition, promoted as means of strengthening solidarity networks and encouraging opposition.<\/p>\n

PhotoEspa\u00f1a takes its theme from Reimagining<\/a>, a diverse group show of 13 accomplished projects by photographers exploring varied approaches to their subjects and their medium.<\/p>\n

Among them, Txema Salvans takes a caustic look at life on the road, no longer a symbol of prosperity and expansion, in his Wreckage of a Catastrophe series.<\/p>\n

Jon Gorospe\u2019s The Grid uses video and audio to examine the environments and routines of commuting. Aleix Plademunt displays more than 120 black-and-white photographs to evoke a colonial gaze and its narrowed focus on rubber trees in the Peruvian rainforest.<\/p>\n

And Eduardo Nave, describing his Espacio Disponible series as \u201cthe opposite of Times Square,\u201d photographs empty and rusting billboards that advertise their own obsolescence and the transition to the digital era.<\/p>\n

Two exhibitions pay homage to canonical photobooks, one from the 1980s, the other from the fifties: Richard Avedon. In the American West, 1979-1984<\/a> at Fundaci\u00f3n Mapfre, and Robert Frank and The Americans<\/a> at Espacio Fundaci\u00f3n Telef\u00f3nica.<\/p>\n

Clockwise from top left: Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, Davis, California, 9 May 1981; Sandra Bennett, 12 years old, Rocky Ford, Colorado, 23 August 1980; David Beason, shipping clerk, Denver, Colorado, 25 July 1981; Petra Alvarado, factory worker, on her birthday, El Paso, Texas, 22 April 1982. Photographs: Richard Avedon\/The Richard Avedon Foundation<\/p>\n

Avedon travelled with a team of assistants, a large format camera and a backdrop. He could take up to two days \u2013 in the case of beekeeper Ronald Fischer \u2013 to complete a portrait. Frank preferred to arrive unannounced, Leica 35mm in hand, work swiftly and move on.<\/p>\n

Funeral, St Helena, South Carolina, from The Americans. Photograph: Robert Frank<\/p>\n

Differences aside, certain similarities remain: both projects achieved their fullest expression in book form, and both have long been recognised as exemplary. Not least, and central to their enduring relevance, is the sense that both photographers testified to an American reality that no amount of rhetoric \u2013 of the Cold War fifties or Reaganite eighties – could disguise.<\/p>\n

Guy Lane travelled to Madrid as a guest of PhotoEspa\u00f1a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PhotoEspa\u00f1a, Spain\u2019s leading festival of photography, held its official opening in Madrid this month and by September nearly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-488115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}