From the US-Mexico border to protests in Poland: highlights of PhotoEspaña 2026
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- PhotoEspaña opened in Madrid this month under the theme of "reimagining," with nearly 100 exhibitions showcasing more than 300 visual artists by September across the capital and other Spanish venues.
- Alejandro Cartagena at Fundación Mapfre presents three series on the US-Mexico border (Invisible Line, Between Borders, Los Americanos), arguing the wall "dissolves the idea of identity and personhood" by making border communities "generic, no one."
- Laia Abril at Museo del Romanticismo displays seven life-size portraits — six women and one trans man — photographed from above in the postures they adopt to manage endometriosis pain, with triptych presentation echoing the body's "fight" and "disconnection."
- Viviane Sassen retrospective "Lux and Umbra" at the Fernán Gómez centre explores her career shaped by a Kenyan childhood and surrealist influences, with recurring themes of death, sexuality, and mourning rendered in deliberately ambiguous terms.
- Rafal Milach at Circulo de Bellas Artes showcases the Archive of Public Protests — a platform for his and others' protest photography from Poland and eastern Europe — pairing banners, murals, and free newspapers as tools for "strengthening solidarity networks."
- The festival's flagship "Reimagining" group show gathers 13 projects, including Aleix Plademunt's 120+ black-and-white photos examining the colonial gaze on Peruvian rubber plantations and Eduardo Nave's series of rusting billboards framed as "the opposite of Times Square."
- Two exhibitions honor canonical photobooks — Richard Avedon's "In the American West, 1979-1984" at Fundación Mapfre and Robert Frank's "The Americans" at Espacio Fundación Telefónica — both credited with bearing photographic witness to American realities that Cold War and Reaganite rhetoric could not disguise.
Why it matters: PhotoEspaña's scale — nearly 100 exhibitions and more than 300 artists — positions Spain's flagship photography festival as one of the few European venues able to bring together US-Mexico border work, Eastern European protest archives, and Spanish-language chronic illness photography under a single curatorial frame, giving audiences direct access to projects with limited touring reach.
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