THIS YEAR, 230 artists from 35 countries appear at 69 exhibitions in various art spaces, museums and galleries, we well as public places (PHotoMarathon and Photography Night). The festival crosses the borders to Portugal (following a similar collaboration with France last year) – where two of the exhibitions take place in Berardo and Portimao Museums. This may be the influence of the festival’s Portugal-based chief curator - Sergio Mah.
The main part of the festival revolves around the theme ‘Place’, in a sense of private and public, real and fictitious locations. Sergio Mah hoped it to be ‘tackled not as a physical and spatial concept but as something already lived, where the experience of the photographer takes on fundamental significance’.
PhotoEspana brings together amateur and professional, emerging and established artists. Just to name a few: Javier Vallhonrat, Thomas Demand, Roni Horn, Joachim Schmid, Paul Graham, Guillaume Herbaut, Simon Norfolk, Florian Maier-Aichen, W. Eugene Smith, Bill Brandt and Robert Smithson.
Among the educational and interactive events, PHE Meetings, at the beginning of June, took on to discuss the future of photography, chaired by Di Joan Fontcuberta, National Photography Awardwinner. PHE Discoveries programme at the Al Aguila Complex enables 70 artists shortlisted from 900 open submissions to present their portfolios to 20 selected curators.
PhotoEspana 2008
4 June – 27 July
Madrid – various locations
Spain
www.phedigital.com
W. Eugene Smith, Trabajador del acero con gafas protectoras, 1955. The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith
