PhotoEspaña, 1 June – 24 July 2011
This year, Spain's annual PhotoEspaña Festival is focusing on the portrait genre. The principal curator Gerardo Mosquera has concentrated the essence of the concept into the title Interfaces: Portraiture and Communication; however, alongside several shows dedicated to the main subject, the festival is also hosting a number of special projects. The programme of PhotoEspaña comprises 67 exhibitions representing 370 artists, including Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff, Alfredo Jaar, et al, hosting over 60 different events: creative workshops (including creative workshops for families), portfolio reviews, master classes, educational programmes, projection shows and activities in the streets, thus attempting to involve all possible age groups of the potential audience.
Elaborating on the key motif of this year's festival - Interfaces: Portraiture and Communication - the organisers emphasise that portrait is one of the main genres in photography. Its essential element - face - is a mirror of the human personality, a sort of litmus paper that speaks volumes. At the same time, a photographic portrait is a photographer's interpretation, a modulation of a situation. Its author is like a link between the depicted person and the viewer who, in his turn, creates an interpratation of his own (in which an important part is played by his own experience).
The Portraiture and Communication show held at Teatro Fernán Gómez is singled out as the central exhibition of the festival programme's official section, featuring the works of more than 30 artists and photographers working between the 1960s and the present and adhering to the view that portrait (the human face) is one of the key identifying elements of the human being, the fundamental element of mutual communication.
Meanwhile Madrid's Alcalá 31 exhibition hall presents 1000 Faces / 0 Faces / 1 Face. Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff, Frank Montero Collado, a show featuring works by two icons of contemporary art, Thomas Ruff and Cindy Sherman, as well as photographs by Frank Montero, which, created in the late 1800s - early 1900s, goes on public view for the first time.
The Paparazzo Extraordinaire exhibition by the notorious paparazzo Ron Galella is on view at Círculo des Bellas Artes, one of Madrid's most significant cultural centres. Ron Galella is described as one of the most famous and controversial tabloid photographers of the 20th century, a pioneer of the genre. The show comprises over a hundred photographs featuring celebrities 'caught' in some intimate and personal moments of their lives; Ron Galella's subjects include Jacqueline Kennedy, Marlon Brando, John Lennon, Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley, et al.
Círculo des Bellas Artes also presents Cámara Ardiente: Prostitutas de Fernell Franco, a show by the Colombian photographer Fernell Franco who worked all his life as a reporter; the portraits of prostitutes, shot in the 1970s, are part of his analysis of the urban life.
The OffFestival programme, a significant part of the PhotoEspaña Festival, offers a selection of the best works from a number of Madrid galleries, this time exhibited all side by side.
Like every year, an impressive number of private and public institutions of culture and art, as well as foreign embassies have been involved in the mounting of the festival; the result of this cooperation is over 120 photography-centred exhibitions and events held during the festival in Madrid.
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