“Reimagining” is the theme of the 29th edition of PHotoESPAÑA, a photography festival which brings nearly 100 exhibitions to Madrid and other cities across Spain, including Barcelona, Santander, Seville and Zaragoza. In the face of today’s relentless image consumption, where five billion photos are made daily, the event focuses on “curiosity, imagination, liberation and rebellion,” celebrating the past century’s most game-changing approaches to the medium. The 2026 programme includes major solo shows from leading figures, including influential photographic projects of the 1900s. Fundación MAPFRE (6 June – 30 August), for example, pays homage to Richard Avedon’s landmark photobook In the American West (1979–1984), which traverses 21 US states and is considered his masterpiece. The seminal series, which includes 103 portraits of people Avedon met along the way, creates a direct dialogue with Robert Frank’s road trip opus The Americans (1958), shown in Spain for the first time at Telefónica Foundation until 1 November.
PHotoESPAÑA is also renowned for platforming contemporary talent. In Madrid, LUX & UMBRA by Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen (3 June – 26 July) brings together three decades of work at the borderlines of fashion, fine art and surrealism. It is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Spain, and features the celebrated Flamboya and Parasomnia series, which draw on Sassen’s childhood in Kenya and subsequent visits to Africa, as well as the recent Cadavre Exquis collages. These new works are based on the “exquisite corpse” technique: a creative game that the Surrealists used to play, where body parts are cut and paste together to produce new, hybrid creatures. Light, shadow and experimentation are key to Sassen’s practice.
Other shows in the city include Tropicália at The Apartment (until 31 July). Three creatives – Ariamna Contino, Márcio Vilela and María Ana Vasco Costa – depict tropical landscapes, drawing on traditional medicinal knowledge and offering lush depictions of Brazilian forests. Later in the festival’s run, Modes of Seeing opens at Complutense Art Center (3 – 27 September). It brings together work by 50 contemporary visual artists who are exploring how identity, memory and a sense of belonging are constructed in today’s fast-paced, digitised world. The resulting images are often uncanny and off-kilter, none so much as Telmo Meana’s staged scenes. In one cinematic shot, part of the artist’s The Monstrous is Plausible series, a figure overlooks a crystal-clear swimming pool, only to find a huge shadow lurking under the water’s surface.
At COAM – Official College of Architects of Madrid, meanwhile, Sonia Celma presents Columna (15 June – 21 August), a series which transforms a deeply personal experience – her daughter’s scoliosis – into a visual and symbolic exploration of the body, architecture and maternal bonds. The artist establishes a dialogue between her daughter and classical buildings, taking the Roman Mausoleum of Fabara, Zaragoza, as reference. The mausoleum’s third column, which was repaired centuries ago, still bears the visible trace of a fracture. Now, across Celma’s collection of high contrast black-and-white images, it serves as an analogy for pain and repair. The photographs make for delicate, meditative and thoughtful viewing.
Amongst the wider line-up are Alejandro Cartagena, Laia Abril and Rafal Milach. They are each known for engaging with key issues of our times, from urbanisation to healthcare and power structures. Cartagena’s Ground Rules (Fundación MAPFRE, 6 June – 30 August) addresses migration, housing and borders. At the Museum of Romanticism until 13 September, Abril turns much-needed attention to endometriosis, a chronic inflammatory disease affecting some 190 million women and uterus-bearing people worldwide. Milach, meanwhile, traces the construction and dismantling of official narratives in Eastern Europe. (Circle of Fine Arts, 5 June – 27 September). Across its expansive programme, PHotoESPAÑA demonstrates the power of photography not only to document the world as it is, but to raise questions and spark change.
PHotoESPAÑA runs until 13 September.
Words: Eleanor Sutherland
Image Credits:
1. Márcio Vilela, Superflora #4, 2021 © Marcio Vilela
2. Robert Frank. Trolley – New Orleans, 1955. Collection Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris © Robert Frank Foundation, from The Americans.
3. Viviane Sassen. Purple Magazine, 2004 © Viviane Sassen
4&5. Sonia Celma. From the series Columna. © Sonia Celma
6. Telmo Meana, Lo monstruoso verosímil. © TELMO MEANA
