PHotoESPAÑA 2022

The International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts is celebrating its 25-year anniversary from 1 June to 28 August 2022. An unmissable event in the world of visual arts and photography, this year’s festival will feature 120 exhibitions of work by 442 photographers and visual artists spread across the city's major museums, exhibition halls, and art galleries. Documentary style photography, women photographers, and classical and contemporary Spanish creators will be the focus of this edition taking place at 31 national and 12 international venues.

The programme is divided into two sections: the Official Section and the Off Festival, at which several awards will be presented, recognising the work of some of the participating artists. Numerous museums and exhibition halls will be taking part in these sections, with the aim of promoting and developing the market for photography. The main areas included in the 2022 edition are documentary style photography; the visibility of women photographers; Spanish photographers; new forms of expression in the field of photography and visual arts, and the ability of this genre to address current issues.

Vicent Todoli (advisor for the Per Amor a l’Art Collection) and Sandra Guimarães (artistic director of Bombas Gens Centre d’Art) are the special guest curators. In the section entitled Sculpting reality, they will give an overview of the best documentary style photography, from the 1930s to the present, through two major collective exhibitions and a meeting with photographers.

At this year’s edition, Spain’s National Heritage institution, Patrimonio Nacional, will be providing venues for the first time, hosting part of the programme in emblematic spaces such as the Royal Palace and the Panteón de Hombres Ilustres (Pantheon of Illustrious Men). The exhibition, Sebastiao Salgado and the Royal Collections. Encounters around landscape photography, will be presented at the Royal Palace, featuring the works of W. Atkinson, J. Laurent, C. Clifford, and Wodbury & Page. The Panteón will be the site for the installation piece entitled Caida Libre (Free Fall) by Beatriz Ruibal.

The Official Section of the festival will feature several collective proposals that address very different aspects of photography. The space CentroCentro will house the exhibition Hybrids. Forging new realities as counter–narrative, which encompasses the work of photographers selected to participate in the international Futures Photography platform; and the exhibition Public photography. The 60s, which explores the power of image in the pages of books, magazines, and newspapers.

Casa Árabe will offer a perspective on current Lebanese photography in Light or shadow of what was and what remains. This project won the second edition of the NUR competition, run by Casa Árabe and PHotoESPAÑA, and features work by 12 authors.

At the Círculo de Bellas Artes, you can enjoy an exhibition that traces the history of documentary style photography with works by authors such as Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Joel Meyerowitz, Ian Wallace, and Susan Meiselas, among others. Casa de América offers two proposals including an exhibition on the origins of documentary style photography with pioneering artists of this aesthetic category and another exhibition that presents a set of works as a reference to the arrival of colour in this genre from the 1960s onwards. Espacio Fundación Telefónica will explore documentary style photography through some of the genre’s leading names such as Susan Meiselas, Ian Wallace, and the Spanish photographic duo Bleda & Rosa.

Female voices in photography

Spain's National Museum of Engraving is hosting an exhibition entitled Amsterdam Boxes: Katia Horna and Margaret Michaels in the Civil War, which brings together the unpublished work of these two anarchical photojournalists. At the Museum of Romanticism, you can see an exhibition entitled Chronicle of an Exile, featuring photographs taken by German photographer Germaine Krull on the boat crossing from the port of Marseille to Martinique.

The Cerralbo Museum will host an individual exhibition devoted to Tina Modotti, which explores the life and work of this Italian photographer, considered one of the most prominent reporters on one of the most convulsive periods in Mexican history.

Main architects of Spanish photography

The 25th anniversary of the festival will also focus on Spanish photography, showing works by established photographers as well as those at the height of their career, and not forgetting younger voices. Among the veterans, it will pay tribute to two of Spain’s great photographers: Carlos Pérez Siquier, with a retrospective showing at Mapfre Foundation, and Francesc Catala Roca, with the show The lucidity of the gaze held at El Águila. In addition, in the Royal Botanical Garden, the photographer Alberto Garcia – Alix presents his latest project Fantasies in the Prado, manipulating the works of art on display at the Museum, while Canal de Isabel II of the Region of Madrid Exhibition Hall will present the project Matter, by Aleix Plademunt, in which the artist analyses one of the oldest questions about our existence: our origin.

Contemporary Spanish and international women photographers will also have their own space at PHotoESPAÑA,  showing the work of artists Maria Carrión at the Carlos de Amberes Foundation, and Ana Palacios at the Círculo de Bellas Artes.

Finally, the best photobook proposals can be seen at the PHE Gallery, the permanent headquarters of the Festival.