From the US-Mexico border to protests in Poland: highlights of PhotoEspaña 2026 | Photography

PhotoEspaña, Spain’s main pageant of pictures, held its official opening in Madrid this month and by September practically 100 exhibitions can have showcased the work of greater than 300 visible artists within the capital and throughout the nation. Loosely corralled underneath the theme of reimagining, the exhibitions characteristic work by main figures in Spanish and worldwide pictures and fewer well-known rising artists.

Fundación Mapfre hosts an expansive overview of the profession of the Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena, together with three collection he produced specializing in the consequences and that means of the US-Mexico border: Invisible Line, Between Borders and Los Americanos.

Of the border wall he says: “It’s potent, it shows its power all the time. Wherever you look, there’s 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’t mix. There’s this obsession with being separate, being two different cultures.”

The results of separation may be devastating. “One of the interesting or more poignant things of this experience was how the border, the wall, basically dissolves the idea of identity and personhood,” Cartagena says.

“And I’m 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.”

Seven life-size portraits by Laia Abril are put in in an intimate present on the Museo del Romanticismo exploring the debilitating results of endometriosis. Her topics, six girls and a trans man, have been photographed within the postures they undertake to handle their ache.

“The idea was to visualise in real size”, she says. “Their 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.” Abril’s portraits are taken from above in a reference to the just about out-of-body experiences she endures whereas coping along with her personal ache.

The triptych presentation is an extra nod to the bodily results of the situation. “It’s 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’s carrying a lot of pain.”

Lux and Umbra, a retrospective of the work of the Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen on the Fernán Gómez centre, explores a profession marked by a stressed eclecticism. A childhood in Kenya and an curiosity in vogue design and artwork historical past with explicit reference to surrealism all inform a visible language that defies straightforward categorisation.

If sure themes, together with loss of life, sexuality and mourning, recur, they achieve this on strictly ambiguous phrases. Even the umbra, or shadow, of the present’s title has varied meanings, showing in her work as summary or representational, staged or pure, literal or metaphorical.

The Polish photographer Rafal Milach’s strident exhibition at Circulo de Bellas Artes explores the disruptive potential of an engaged documentary apply dedicated to outflanking conventional patterns of spectatorship.

Avowing that “protest photography is quite boring visually, it always looks the same”, Milach directs his energies in direction of making work accessible to new audiences through the Archive of Public Protests, a platform for his and others’ images addressing social and political tensions in Poland and japanese Europe. Banners, murals and free newspapers characteristic within the exhibition, promoted as technique of strengthening solidarity networks and inspiring opposition.

PhotoEspaña takes its theme from Reimagining, a various group present of 13 completed initiatives by photographers exploring different approaches to their topics and their medium.

Among them, Txema Salvans takes a caustic have a look at life on the highway, now not a logo of prosperity and enlargement, in his Wreckage of a Catastrophe collection.

Jon Gorospe’s The Grid makes use of video and audio to look at the environments and routines of commuting. Aleix Plademunt shows greater than 120 black-and-white images to evoke a colonial gaze and its narrowed give attention to rubber timber within the Peruvian rainforest.

And Eduardo Nave, describing his Espacio Disponible collection as “the opposite of Times Square,” images empty and rusting billboards that publicize their very own obsolescence and the transition to the digital period.

Two exhibitions pay homage to canonical photobooks, one from the Eighties, the opposite from the fifties: Richard Avedon. In the American West, 1979-1984 at Fundación Mapfre, and Robert Frank and The Americans at Espacio Fundación Telefónica.

Avedon travelled with a crew of assistants, a big format digital camera and a backdrop. He may take as much as two days – within the case of beekeeper Ronald Fischer – to finish a portrait. Frank most popular to reach unannounced, Leica 35mm in hand, work swiftly and transfer on.

Differences apart, sure similarities stay: each initiatives achieved their fullest expression in e-book type, and each have lengthy been recognised as exemplary. Not least, and central to their enduring relevance, is the sense that each photographers testified to an American actuality that no quantity of rhetoric – of the Cold War fifties or Reaganite eighties – may disguise.

Guy Lane travelled to Madrid as a visitor of PhotoEspaña