From the US-Mexico border to protests in Poland: highlights of PhotoEspaña 2026 | Photography
P.hotoEspaña, Spain’s leading photography festival Official opening in Madrid This month and until September, the works of more than 300 visual artists will be exhibited in nearly 100 exhibitions in the capital and across the country. Loosely grouped under the theme of reimagining, the exhibitions feature work by leading names in Spanish and international photography as well as lesser-known emerging artists.
Fundacion Mapfre It hosts a broad overview of the career of Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena; This series includes three series he produced focusing on the effects and meaning of the US-Mexico border: The Invisible Line, Between Borders and Los Americanos.
He says of the border wall: “It is strong, it always shows its strength. Wherever you look, these sharp lines or huge concrete walls cut you off and show that we are different. They are from the north, we are from the south, and the cultures do not mix. There is an obsession with being separate, being two different cultures.”
The effects of separation can be devastating. “One of the interesting or more poignant things about this experience was how the border, the wall, basically dissolved the idea of identity and personhood,” Cartagena says.
“And I echo that same idea. Who am I? Who are the people living 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 nobody.”
Seven life-size portraits of Laia Abril are placed in an intimate display at the exhibition. Museo del Romance Investigating the debilitating effects of endometriosis. His subjects, six women and one trans man, were photographed in the postures they adopted to cope with their pain.
“The goal was to visualize it life-size,” he says. “Their bodies were showing us when they were in pain, but also what the different positions they were taking as they were trying to get rid of that pain.” Abril’s portraits are shot from above to reference the almost out-of-body experiences she has as she deals with her own pain.
The triple presentation is another nod to the physical effects of the condition. “It’s kind of a struggle between our body fighting the pain and helping us be resilient, but at the same time our body needs to disconnect because it carries so much pain.”
Lux and UmbraA retrospective of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen’s work at the Fernán Gómez center explores a career marked by a restless eclecticism. A childhood spent in Kenya and an interest in fashion design and art history, as well as a special reference to surrealism, create a visual language that defies easy classification.
If certain themes such as death, sexuality, and mourning recur, they do so in decidedly vague terms. Even the shadow or shadow in the exhibition’s title has various meanings; It appears in his works as abstract or representational, staged or natural, literal or figurative.
Remarkable exhibition by Polish photographer Rafal Milach Circulo de Bellas Artes explores the subversive potential of a documentary practice determined to leave traditional audience patterns behind.
Stating that “protest photography is visually quite boring, it always looks the same,” Milach directs his energy to making the work accessible to new audiences. Public Protests Archivea platform for his and others’ photographs that touch on social and political tensions in Poland and Eastern Europe. The exhibition includes banners, murals and free newspapers, promoted as a means of strengthening solidarity networks and encouraging dissent.
PhotoEspaña gets its theme from: RedesignA diverse group exhibition of 13 successful projects in which photographers explore a variety of approaches to their subjects and mediums.
One of them, Txema Salvans, takes a searing look at life on the roads that are no longer symbols of prosperity and expansion in his series The Wreck of a Disaster.
Jon Gorospe’s The Grid uses video and audio to examine commuting environments and routines. Aleix Plademunt exhibits more than 120 black-and-white photographs to evoke the colonial gaze and its focus on rubber trees in the Peruvian rainforest.
And Eduardo Nave, who describes his Espacio Disponible series as “the exact opposite of Times Square,” photographs empty and rusted billboards advertising their own obsolescence and the transition to the digital age.
Two exhibitions, one from the 1980s and the other from the fifties, pay homage to canonical photography books: Richard Avedon. In the American West, 1979-1984 at Fundación Mapfre and Robert Frank and the Americans Espacio Fundación Telefónica.
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Clockwise from top left: Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9, 1981; Sandra Bennett, age 12, Rocky Ford, Colorado, August 23, 1980; David Beason, dispatcher, Denver, Colorado, July 25, 1981; Petra Alvarado, factory worker, on her birthday, El Paso, Texas, April 22, 1982. Photos: Richard Avedon/Richard Avedon Foundation
Avedon traveled with a team of assistants, a large-format camera and a backdrop. In beekeeper Ronald Fischer’s case, it could take up to two days to complete a portrait. Frank chose to arrive unannounced, work quickly, and move on, Leica 35mm in hand.
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Funeral from St Helena, South Carolina, Americans. Photo: Robert Frank
Differences aside, some similarities remain: Both projects achieved their full expression in book form, and both have long been regarded as exemplary. Most importantly, and central to their enduring interest, is the sense that both photographers bear witness to an American reality that no amount of rhetoric from the Cold War fifties or Reagan’s eighties can disguise.
Guy Lane traveled to Madrid as a guest of PhotoEspaña
