Meeting with Sérgio Mah, PHE08 new art director
PHotoEspaña, Madrid’s International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, opens its gates on June, 4. Eleven years have already passed since 1998, when la Fábrica, a cultural management entity, launched what was to become one of the most prominent cultural events in the world. The programme of this upcoming edition consists of fifty exhibitions in museums, public institutions and art galleries. From the beginning of June till the end of July, two-hundred image makers from all over the world will present their works during this big “fiesta” of photography which will literally place Madrid once more at the heart of international attention.
Faithful to its main commitment, PHotoEspaña has served all these years as a fresh and solid platform for international photography beyond frontiers, strict policy strategies and narrow-minded public interests. Encompassing various subjects and genres -from pure documentary bias to arty, conceptual approaches and from human drama to lyricism and humour- the Festival has maintained a balance between tradition and innovation. During PHotoEspaña, both prestigious artists and promising young talents can have their own share of Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. At the same time, the Festival boosts the spirits of a country with a relatively poor photography panorama, at least as much as institutional support, infrastructures and art market dynamics are concerned, demonstrating that things are not always what they appear to be. By supporting an extraordinary feedback from the local creative industry and the international contemporary photography scene, it seduces more and more visitors each year. Numbers speak for themselves: in 2007 they were more than half a million; this year the numbers are expected to increase. With all rights then, PHotoEspaña has set its reputation on stone beyond dispute, if not as “the most important photography festival in the world”, as the French newspaper Le Monde has put it, certainly as an ambitious cultural event in full expansion.
The Festival has always adopted alternative approaches to photography, leaving full liberty to its various artistic directors to undertake different conceptual paths. Each edition is dedicated to a specific topic developed in the Official Section, which includes shows hosted in major museums and institutions. After a short break -PHE07 lacked a concrete subject- the new edition comes back to its roots, directing its spotlight on the notion of “Place” approached, according to the festival’s central statement, “as a physical and concrete reality but also as a concept which refers to mental, virtual and mythical territories”.
Does it not all sound a little familiar, however? Engaged with topics such as “City” and “Nature”, the previous editions of 2005 and 2006 respectively contained a great deal of “topography” and “geography” as their inherent elements. In what sense does the new edition mark a novel direction? The Portuguese curator Sérgio Mah, who has been appointed artistic director of PHotoEspaña over the next three years, does not deny the interconnection of this present edition with its predecessors. “Unarguably, the notion of place encompasses meanings such as the city or nature”, he admits. But then he goes further to assert that the very same notion embraces much more than spatiality, since it can obtain both physical and emotional dimensions. “Actually, “place” has always been a big issue in photography and still is today”, explains Mah. “Artists finding themselves in specific geographic contexts offer their own dimension of the world. Place is precisely what sustains the connection between the photographer and the subject he photographs. It provides him with the framework for a consistent statement about a reality he knows better and the ground for a further sustained critique based on attitudes and local ethics. Therefore, photography gains a paramount importance in the way we understand places and the social and geographic meanings we attribute to them”.
Effectively, photography occupies a key role in our understanding of the world, and, invertedly, the awareness of finding oneself belonging somewhere is a very crucial element in photography. Let us take as an example the fact that many of the great masters of the medium have been inextricably related to specific places: Atget and Brassai with Paris, Walker Evans with the American South, Bill Brandt with London. All these creators are somehow responsible for what these “toponyms” are in the popular consciousness today. But there is more to this, which brings us to the deep political dimension of the issue. As Mah rightfully remarks, “photographers find themselves in supposedly unimportant locations but the way they decide to take pictures confers on “non-places” new meanings and connections. The social and political parameters of this posture become extremely important today, especially if one considers that due to the abrupt change of international economy, places everywhere tend to all look the same”.
Globalization versus history, memory and symbolic values… In response to all this, PHotoEspaña’s statement brings to the foreground the mission of contemporary photography, which is to encourage heightened awareness. According to Sérgio Mah, “place becomes the tool through which the contemporary photo-lens can explore the world, adapting territorial perspectives that counteract the predominating post-modernist and capitalist perspective”. Enclosing a more global vision, “place” also becomes the “leitmotif” of a clear curatorial proposal that slide-steps fancy conceptual worrying: “As a huge democratic event appealing to thousands of people in a metropolis such as Madrid, PHotoEspaña is more in need of a main motif that clarifies different perspectives and aspects of photography as a practice within visual arts, than of a specific theme”.
Following these guidelines, the exhibitions of the official section are dedicated to international creators as diverse in their practice and philosophy as Bill Brandt, Robert Smithson, Roni Horn, Florian Maier-Aichen, Henryk Ross, Minerva Cuevas, Cristina Garcia Rodero and Harri Pälviranta, alongside young talents. Among the most significant presences in this year’s statement are also photographers of the calibre of Eugene Smith, Thomas Demand and Javier Vallhonrat. Each belonging to a different generation, country and artistic string, these three creators stand as rigorous examples of the distinct ideological and conceptual formulas, through which photography has integrated the notion of place in its visual discourse.
El Centro Cultural de la Villa/Fundación Santander presents a retrospective exhibition on Eugene Smith (1918-1978), one of the greatest documentary photographers of all times. Smith passed on to become part of the pantheon of the classics of photography for his incessant, uncompromising personality; he would not hesitate to resign from all big magazines of the time, such as Newsweek and Life, once they raised obstacles to his work. In the forties, Smith gained acknowledgement for his brutally vivid World War II photographs and from the fifties onwards, he undertook his famous photo essays that established empathy to specific places and their inhabitants’ human spirit. Two of his most emblematic projects are the incomplete Pittsburgh photo essay, envisioned as an epic approach of the city as a living entity, which Smith started in 1955 after joining Magnum and Minamata (1971), a long-term project on the effects of mercury poisoning in a Japanese fishing village. Eugene Smith’s lifelong commitment to the documentation of the immediate relation of places and their people with history, reflects a crucial moment in the history of photography, during which the quest for veracity attributed to the photographic document a decisive role in the ethical projection of minorities and non-places.
The pseudo-documentary images of German photographer Thomas Demand (Munich, 1964), which will be on display at the Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, highlight a totally distinct spatial awareness. After making his first steps as a sculptor, Demand turned to photography as a way to record his ephemeral paper constructions. Then photography took over, becoming the model in itself. Employing as his point of inspiration pre-existing images released in the press, Demand meticulously reconstructs life-sized exteriors and interiors with coloured paper and cardboard. Demand’s seemingly inoffensive and ordinary ambiences start to make sense as sceneries of controversial public relevance coming to our awareness through media coverage. In this way, a simple domestic setting, like a kitchen, is transformed into the Kitchen in Sadam Hussein’s Hideaway in Tikrit, and a regular building becomes the embassy of Nigeria in Rome where the Yellowcake story unfolded in 2003. Of course, in the same way that the assumption about the uranium supposedly linking Iraq to the mass production of weapons was a forged hypothesis that scrutinized our perception of reality, Demand’s facsimiles of natural environments and architectural spaces create a false illusion of realness pushing the medium of photography towards uncharted territories. Things enter reality through photographs to such an extent that places themselves are transformed into stylized paradigm simulations of prefabricated media news and key facts of contemporary history. A surveillance camera is always there to record all experienced reality, which seems to start and end within a screen…
Entangled with photography and video-installations, the work of Spanish photographer Javier Vallhonrat (1953), which will be shown at Canal de Isabel II, conveys the capacity of photography to uncover the emotional and psychological potential of the places we inhabit. In their majority, Vallhonrat’s ambiences consist of an attempt to “humanize” natural spaces, by domesticating them through the construction of a fictionalized reality. But, humanizing in Vallhonrat’s language is equivalent to imbuing settings with a complex emotional temperature, in which the unpredicted but always poetic nuances of human feelings generate unexpected exposures and contradictions.
The three artist cases reviewed above give only a fragmented idea of the various approaches to be manifested in June. PHotoEspaña is in constant growth, establishing a nexus of further contributors; among them the galleries and art venues participating in the Off Section, and a foreign country as satellite guest. If last year’s collaboration with French institutions in Paris and Arles marked the first experiment towards an international expansion of the Festival, this year’s edition involves a synergy with Portugal. A wide range of cultural projects in Lisbon and the Algavre, organized by the Portuguese Ministry of Economy and Innovation, will provide an excellent opportunity for a thorough insight into the panorama of Portuguese photography, which still remains relatively unknown.
The PHotoEspaña programme also fosters a strong theoretical and pedagogical framework, through a series of debates (Encuentros PHE), workshops, seminars and master classes with leading photography masters at the Campus PHE in Aranjuez, and the portfolio review Descubrimientos PHE, one of the festival’s main activities designed to promote up-and-coming photographers. Last but not least, the Festival includes a roster of awards that recognize the work of achievements of artists and professionals dedicated to photography, and various events, such as film screenings.
The philosophy of PHotoEspaña is a compendium of different activities, which do not wish to offer exclusively one perspective in the notion of place or photography, but instead, pretend to show the range of attitudes, behaviours and methods in the visual arts. “There are several entrances to access the culture of the photographic”, stresses Mah. “In PHotoEspaña, our principal aim is to mingle photography with other media and disciplines, as well as to impulse a reflection on the idea of the photographic experience rather than on photography itself”. Indeed, the photographic experience as such is not confined within a sectarian world of cameras, but can also be encountered in painting, film and video. In the same way that the theatrical practice does not merely exist within the theatre, one cannot establish strict frontiers of what is -or, more accurately- what has to be photography and its strategies. And that is where a must-attended event such as PhotoEspaña enters the game, providing us with a unique opportunity to discover new aspects of the medium and its creators.
We are looking forward to it!
PhotoEspaña 08, Madrid, June, 4-July, 27, 2008
Thomas Demand
Javier Vallhonrat
Eugene Smith
Published in Eyemazing 02/2008
PHotoEspaña, Madrid’s International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, opens its gates on June, 4. Eleven years have already passed since 1998, when la Fábrica, a cultural management entity, launched what was to become one of the most prominent cultural events in the world. The programme of this upcoming edition consists of fifty exhibitions in museums, public institutions and art galleries. From the beginning of June till the end of July, two-hundred image makers from all over the world will present their works during this big “fiesta” of photography which will literally place Madrid once more at the heart of international attention.
Faithful to its main commitment, PHotoEspaña has served all these years as a fresh and solid platform for international photography beyond frontiers, strict policy strategies and narrow-minded public interests. Encompassing various subjects and genres -from pure documentary bias to arty, conceptual approaches and from human drama to lyricism and humour- the Festival has maintained a balance between tradition and innovation. During PHotoEspaña, both prestigious artists and promising young talents can have their own share of Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. At the same time, the Festival boosts the spirits of a country with a relatively poor photography panorama, at least as much as institutional support, infrastructures and art market dynamics are concerned, demonstrating that things are not always what they appear to be. By supporting an extraordinary feedback from the local creative industry and the international contemporary photography scene, it seduces more and more visitors each year. Numbers speak for themselves: in 2007 they were more than half a million; this year the numbers are expected to increase. With all rights then, PHotoEspaña has set its reputation on stone beyond dispute, if not as “the most important photography festival in the world”, as the French newspaper Le Monde has put it, certainly as an ambitious cultural event in full expansion.
The Festival has always adopted alternative approaches to photography, leaving full liberty to its various artistic directors to undertake different conceptual paths. Each edition is dedicated to a specific topic developed in the Official Section, which includes shows hosted in major museums and institutions. After a short break -PHE07 lacked a concrete subject- the new edition comes back to its roots, directing its spotlight on the notion of “Place” approached, according to the festival’s central statement, “as a physical and concrete reality but also as a concept which refers to mental, virtual and mythical territories”.
Does it not all sound a little familiar, however? Engaged with topics such as “City” and “Nature”, the previous editions of 2005 and 2006 respectively contained a great deal of “topography” and “geography” as their inherent elements. In what sense does the new edition mark a novel direction? The Portuguese curator Sérgio Mah, who has been appointed artistic director of PHotoEspaña over the next three years, does not deny the interconnection of this present edition with its predecessors. “Unarguably, the notion of place encompasses meanings such as the city or nature”, he admits. But then he goes further to assert that the very same notion embraces much more than spatiality, since it can obtain both physical and emotional dimensions. “Actually, “place” has always been a big issue in photography and still is today”, explains Mah. “Artists finding themselves in specific geographic contexts offer their own dimension of the world. Place is precisely what sustains the connection between the photographer and the subject he photographs. It provides him with the framework for a consistent statement about a reality he knows better and the ground for a further sustained critique based on attitudes and local ethics. Therefore, photography gains a paramount importance in the way we understand places and the social and geographic meanings we attribute to them”.
Effectively, photography occupies a key role in our understanding of the world, and, invertedly, the awareness of finding oneself belonging somewhere is a very crucial element in photography. Let us take as an example the fact that many of the great masters of the medium have been inextricably related to specific places: Atget and Brassai with Paris, Walker Evans with the American South, Bill Brandt with London. All these creators are somehow responsible for what these “toponyms” are in the popular consciousness today. But there is more to this, which brings us to the deep political dimension of the issue. As Mah rightfully remarks, “photographers find themselves in supposedly unimportant locations but the way they decide to take pictures confers on “non-places” new meanings and connections. The social and political parameters of this posture become extremely important today, especially if one considers that due to the abrupt change of international economy, places everywhere tend to all look the same”.
Globalization versus history, memory and symbolic values… In response to all this, PHotoEspaña’s statement brings to the foreground the mission of contemporary photography, which is to encourage heightened awareness. According to Sérgio Mah, “place becomes the tool through which the contemporary photo-lens can explore the world, adapting territorial perspectives that counteract the predominating post-modernist and capitalist perspective”. Enclosing a more global vision, “place” also becomes the “leitmotif” of a clear curatorial proposal that slide-steps fancy conceptual worrying: “As a huge democratic event appealing to thousands of people in a metropolis such as Madrid, PHotoEspaña is more in need of a main motif that clarifies different perspectives and aspects of photography as a practice within visual arts, than of a specific theme”.
Following these guidelines, the exhibitions of the official section are dedicated to international creators as diverse in their practice and philosophy as Bill Brandt, Robert Smithson, Roni Horn, Florian Maier-Aichen, Henryk Ross, Minerva Cuevas, Cristina Garcia Rodero and Harri Pälviranta, alongside young talents. Among the most significant presences in this year’s statement are also photographers of the calibre of Eugene Smith, Thomas Demand and Javier Vallhonrat. Each belonging to a different generation, country and artistic string, these three creators stand as rigorous examples of the distinct ideological and conceptual formulas, through which photography has integrated the notion of place in its visual discourse.
El Centro Cultural de la Villa/Fundación Santander presents a retrospective exhibition on Eugene Smith (1918-1978), one of the greatest documentary photographers of all times. Smith passed on to become part of the pantheon of the classics of photography for his incessant, uncompromising personality; he would not hesitate to resign from all big magazines of the time, such as Newsweek and Life, once they raised obstacles to his work. In the forties, Smith gained acknowledgement for his brutally vivid World War II photographs and from the fifties onwards, he undertook his famous photo essays that established empathy to specific places and their inhabitants’ human spirit. Two of his most emblematic projects are the incomplete Pittsburgh photo essay, envisioned as an epic approach of the city as a living entity, which Smith started in 1955 after joining Magnum and Minamata (1971), a long-term project on the effects of mercury poisoning in a Japanese fishing village. Eugene Smith’s lifelong commitment to the documentation of the immediate relation of places and their people with history, reflects a crucial moment in the history of photography, during which the quest for veracity attributed to the photographic document a decisive role in the ethical projection of minorities and non-places.
The pseudo-documentary images of German photographer Thomas Demand (Munich, 1964), which will be on display at the Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, highlight a totally distinct spatial awareness. After making his first steps as a sculptor, Demand turned to photography as a way to record his ephemeral paper constructions. Then photography took over, becoming the model in itself. Employing as his point of inspiration pre-existing images released in the press, Demand meticulously reconstructs life-sized exteriors and interiors with coloured paper and cardboard. Demand’s seemingly inoffensive and ordinary ambiences start to make sense as sceneries of controversial public relevance coming to our awareness through media coverage. In this way, a simple domestic setting, like a kitchen, is transformed into the Kitchen in Sadam Hussein’s Hideaway in Tikrit, and a regular building becomes the embassy of Nigeria in Rome where the Yellowcake story unfolded in 2003. Of course, in the same way that the assumption about the uranium supposedly linking Iraq to the mass production of weapons was a forged hypothesis that scrutinized our perception of reality, Demand’s facsimiles of natural environments and architectural spaces create a false illusion of realness pushing the medium of photography towards uncharted territories. Things enter reality through photographs to such an extent that places themselves are transformed into stylized paradigm simulations of prefabricated media news and key facts of contemporary history. A surveillance camera is always there to record all experienced reality, which seems to start and end within a screen…
Entangled with photography and video-installations, the work of Spanish photographer Javier Vallhonrat (1953), which will be shown at Canal de Isabel II, conveys the capacity of photography to uncover the emotional and psychological potential of the places we inhabit. In their majority, Vallhonrat’s ambiences consist of an attempt to “humanize” natural spaces, by domesticating them through the construction of a fictionalized reality. But, humanizing in Vallhonrat’s language is equivalent to imbuing settings with a complex emotional temperature, in which the unpredicted but always poetic nuances of human feelings generate unexpected exposures and contradictions.
The three artist cases reviewed above give only a fragmented idea of the various approaches to be manifested in June. PHotoEspaña is in constant growth, establishing a nexus of further contributors; among them the galleries and art venues participating in the Off Section, and a foreign country as satellite guest. If last year’s collaboration with French institutions in Paris and Arles marked the first experiment towards an international expansion of the Festival, this year’s edition involves a synergy with Portugal. A wide range of cultural projects in Lisbon and the Algavre, organized by the Portuguese Ministry of Economy and Innovation, will provide an excellent opportunity for a thorough insight into the panorama of Portuguese photography, which still remains relatively unknown.
The PHotoEspaña programme also fosters a strong theoretical and pedagogical framework, through a series of debates (Encuentros PHE), workshops, seminars and master classes with leading photography masters at the Campus PHE in Aranjuez, and the portfolio review Descubrimientos PHE, one of the festival’s main activities designed to promote up-and-coming photographers. Last but not least, the Festival includes a roster of awards that recognize the work of achievements of artists and professionals dedicated to photography, and various events, such as film screenings.
The philosophy of PHotoEspaña is a compendium of different activities, which do not wish to offer exclusively one perspective in the notion of place or photography, but instead, pretend to show the range of attitudes, behaviours and methods in the visual arts. “There are several entrances to access the culture of the photographic”, stresses Mah. “In PHotoEspaña, our principal aim is to mingle photography with other media and disciplines, as well as to impulse a reflection on the idea of the photographic experience rather than on photography itself”. Indeed, the photographic experience as such is not confined within a sectarian world of cameras, but can also be encountered in painting, film and video. In the same way that the theatrical practice does not merely exist within the theatre, one cannot establish strict frontiers of what is -or, more accurately- what has to be photography and its strategies. And that is where a must-attended event such as PhotoEspaña enters the game, providing us with a unique opportunity to discover new aspects of the medium and its creators.
We are looking forward to it!
PhotoEspaña 08, Madrid, June, 4-July, 27, 2008
Thomas Demand
Javier Vallhonrat
Eugene Smith
Published in Eyemazing 02/2008
