Andrew Barsch - Journalist

This month and beyond, our city lets it all hang out when Madrid becomes “the world capital of photography as Spanish and international photographers, visual artists, critics and experts take part in a programme of exhibitions and activities.” And this year’s festival has undergone one serious makeover. The new artistic director, Horacio Fernández has seen to a number of firsts. They’ve managed to get Prado museum into the action, upping their bet on being taken seriously by old-school intellectuals, and PHotoEspaña has even re-named itself “The International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts” because for the first time, “photography sacrifices part of its pre-eminence to other disciplines such as cinema, video, painting or design”. This year’s theme, entitled Historias, “offers a panoramic view of both narrative and documentary
uses in order to provoke debate and a reflection on the validity of these procedures in contemporary creation”. Huh? That’s the official explanation, anyway. Something to do with photography and filmmaking as a true art form, and it’s impact on history. With so much on offer, it may almost seem like too much to take in, but you’ve got six weeks and a killer website to sort through it all. Merely scratching the surface, we’ve enclosed a few written-word snapshots of what to look into and what to look out for on your quest for aesthetic criteria, or maybe just some cool films and pics, leaving the debate and interpretation to the academics.

Moving pictures
With the first-time inclusion of cinema and video in the mix, we wanted to highlight some of the more intriguing exhibitions of still photography’s distant cousin, and welcome them to the PHE family. A full understanding of what’s trying to be said cannot be guaranteed, but you can bet that there will be none of that bullshit dubbing which normally makes viewing foreign films in Madrid so unbearable. Check out The Buzz Club, at the Real Jardín Botanico, a video on teenagers filmed in two different clubs in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg presents a brief short at Fundación Canal about “habitual restlessness in which anxiety and discomfort contradict the tranquillity usually associated with his North
American country”. And Baltimore at Galería Helga de Alevar is a threescreen video projection in which artist Isaac Julien uses cinematographic techniques to build a story reviewing Afro-American iconography from the 1970s. A_Maze at Galería Pilar Parra invites the “spectator” to climb on top of a platform where a text is written into a maze. Bravo offers video sequences that only appear when the participant, who unconsciously becomes a “player”, activates one of the pressure sensors hidden in the tiles, randomly altering projections and sound.

Taking it to the streets
Along with the galleries and museums showcasing their PHE04 wares this summer, the streets and stations of the city herself will also be taking part in PHotoEspaña. The newly revamped Nuevos Ministerios metro station will display Decisive Portraits by Joachim Schmid, a collection of World War II snapshots, and the Atocha and Recoletos railway stations will exhibit Daniel Blaufuks’s Collected Short Stories which “offers groups of images in pairs converted into a narration”. But the mother-load of PHE04 in the streets is PHotoEspaña En La Calle where the streets, plazas and buildings of Huertas become the art space, and participants follow a route marked out in the streets of the barrio: “Site-specific projects related with the experience of walking, strolling, wandering around the city on foot, observing closely what is happening nearby and how this experience generates images, scenes and narrations that temporarily share space with day-to-day street stories.”

Competing for photographic glory
What would an art festival be without some good-old-fashioned cut-throat competition? The winner of the festival’s portfolio review receives the Descubrimientos Award for the Best Portfolio, an exhibition in PHE05. Images by all the finalists are shown during the festival at the Night-time Projections and the Santa Ana Projections and www.phedigital.com will house a microsite for one year containing the images of all those selected. There’s also the Injuve Award for the Best Young Photographer, the year’s Best Photography Publication Award, and the Off Festival Award. The PHotoEspaña Award is the festival’s most important award, and is decided by the PHE04 organisation. A jury of experts grants the rest of the awards.

Cyber planning
Now before heading off into the streets to get your photofix, you may want to get your times, dates, and venues sorted, because with so much going on in so many different
places around the capital, a bit of pre-planned cyber strategy can make all the difference in the world. PHEdigital is the Internet version of PHotoEspaña and receives almost two million visitors each year. It contains all festival information and hundreds of photographs of the exhibitions and activities. There are also two contests, Tu Historia, a photo-story contest in which participants write a short story based on any of the 10 images proposed by the festival organisation, and Quién sabe cómo, a digital photography contest designed as a reflection on literature and photography, in which participants have to recreate a story using their own images basing them on the fragments of famous literary works provided by the PHotoEspaña organisation. Take note of the PHE04 Map which highlights everything geographically. Happy mapping. You’re ready to go.