We become generic, we become no one.
Each June, Madrid opens a window onto the world's unresolved questions, and PhotoEspaña 2026 is no exception — gathering more than three hundred photographers whose work circles around borders, bodies, and the stubborn human need to be seen. From the concrete walls that erase identity along the US-Mexico divide to the intimate geometries of chronic pain, the festival asks what it means to reimagine the world through a lens. It is, at its core, a meditation on testimony: the photograph as the last argument against forgetting.
- Borders don't just divide land — Alejandro Cartagena's retrospective shows how walls strip people of identity, turning individuals into abstractions, and his photographs fight to give that selfhood back.
- Laia Abril's life-size portraits of endometriosis sufferers force viewers to inhabit a kind of pain that medicine and society have long preferred to look away from.
- Rafal Milach has grown frustrated with protest photography that all looks the same, and has built an entire archive and exhibition to prove that solidarity can find a sharper visual language.
- The festival's sprawling central exhibition, Reimagining, ranges from abandoned road-life to colonial rubber plantations, suggesting that photographers are less interested in answers than in the quality of their questions.
- Two towering retrospectives — Avedon's deliberate, large-format American West and Frank's restless, handheld America — remind visitors that the photobook has always been where truth outlasts the official story.
PhotoEspaña 2026 has opened across Madrid with nearly a hundred exhibitions running through September, loosely organized around the idea of reimagining — a broad enough concept to hold more than three hundred artists and the full range of what photography can do.
At the Fundación Mapfre, Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena presents a major retrospective built around three series on the US-Mexico border. For Cartagena, the wall is not merely infrastructure — it is a declaration that separation is the point, a structure that doesn't just divide geography but dissolves identity. "We become generic, we become no one," he says. His photographs from Invisible Line, Between Borders, and Los Americanos work against that erasure.
At the Museo del Romanticismo, Laia Abril has installed seven life-size portraits of people living with endometriosis, photographed from above in the positions their bodies have learned to hold when pain arrives. The elevated angle mirrors the dissociation of suffering; the triptych format echoes the body's own oscillation between resilience and collapse.
Viviane Sassen's retrospective Lux and Umbra at the Fernán Gómez centre draws on her upbringing in Kenya and her studies in fashion and surrealism, producing a visual language that moves fluidly between death, sexuality, and mourning without resolving into any single meaning. Meanwhile, at the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Polish photographer Rafal Milach has responded to the visual monotony of protest imagery by building the Archive of Public Protests — a living platform of photographs, banners, murals, and free newspapers designed to strengthen solidarity networks across Poland and eastern Europe.
The festival's central group show gathers thirteen projects in conversation: abandoned vehicles, commuter routines, a colonial gaze on Peruvian rainforest, rusting billboards advertising a vanished world. Two historical retrospectives anchor the programme — Richard Avedon's painstaking large-format portraits of the American West and Robert Frank's swift, unannounced dispatches from 1950s America. Different in method, both photographers shared a commitment to testimony, and both proved that the photobook is where truth tends to survive longest.
Madrid's photography festival has opened its doors to nearly a hundred exhibitions that will run through September, bringing together work from more than three hundred artists—some of them household names in the medium, others still finding their footing. PhotoEspaña, Spain's flagship showcase for the form, has organized itself loosely around a single idea: reimagining. What that means, in practice, is a sprawling conversation about how photographers see the world, and what they choose to show us about it.
At the Fundación Mapfre, the Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena has mounted a substantial retrospective that centers on three series he made about the US-Mexico border. The work is unflinching. Cartagena describes the border wall itself as a statement of power—jagged lines and massive concrete barriers that announce, constantly, that separation is the point. "They are from the north, we are from the south and the cultures don't mix," he says of the wall's message. But what interests him most is what the wall does to the people who live near it. The barrier, he argues, doesn't just divide geography. It erases identity. It turns individuals into abstractions. "We become generic, we become no one," he says. His photographs, drawn from the series Invisible Line, Between Borders, and Los Americanos, are an attempt to restore what the wall takes away.
Elsewhere in the city, Laia Abril has installed seven life-size portraits at the Museo del Romanticismo. Her subjects—six women and a trans man—are photographed in the positions their bodies have learned to adopt when pain arrives. Abril is documenting endometriosis, a condition that reshapes how people move through the world. She photographs from above, a perspective that mirrors the strange distance people feel from their own bodies when they are suffering. The portraits are arranged in triptychs, a formal choice that echoes the condition itself: the body fighting to survive, the body needing to disconnect, the body caught between resilience and collapse.
The Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen has a retrospective titled Lux and Umbra at the Fernán Gómez centre. Her work resists easy summary. She grew up in Kenya, studied fashion and art history with a particular interest in surrealism, and her photographs reflect all of that—a visual language that circles around themes of death, sexuality, and mourning without ever settling into a single interpretation. Even shadow, the umbra of the show's title, means different things in her work: it can be abstract or concrete, staged or found, literal or metaphorical.
At the Circulo de Bellas Artes, the Polish photographer Rafal Milach has mounted an exhibition that takes documentary photography as a tool for social change. He has grown impatient with what he calls the visual monotony of protest photography—it all looks the same, he argues. His response has been to build the Archive of Public Protests, a platform that collects photographs addressing social and political tensions in Poland and eastern Europe. The exhibition includes banners, murals, and free newspapers, all of them designed as ways to strengthen solidarity networks and encourage opposition.
The festival's central group show, Reimagining, brings together thirteen projects that demonstrate the range of what photographers are thinking about right now. Txema Salvans photographs abandoned vehicles and the wreckage of a life once lived on the road. Jon Gorospe uses video and audio to examine the routines of commuting. Aleix Plademunt has assembled more than a hundred and twenty black-and-white photographs that evoke a colonial gaze fixed on rubber trees in the Peruvian rainforest. Eduardo Nave photographs empty billboards—the opposite of Times Square, he says—rusting advertisements for a world that no longer exists.
Two exhibitions pay homage to canonical photobooks from different eras. Richard Avedon's portraits from the American West, made between 1979 and 1984, are on view at the Fundación Mapfre. Avedon travelled with assistants, a large format camera, and a backdrop. He could spend two days on a single portrait—the beekeeper Ronald Fischer required that much time. Robert Frank's The Americans, from the nineteen-fifties, is at the Espacio Fundación Telefónica. Frank worked differently: he arrived without warning, shot quickly with a thirty-five millimeter Leica, and moved on. What both photographers shared was a commitment to testimony. Both projects achieved their fullest expression as books, and both have endured because they captured an American reality that the rhetoric of their time—Cold War in Frank's era, Reagan's America in Avedon's—could not obscure.
Citações Notáveis
The border wall shows its power all the time. Wherever you look, there's these jagged lines or massive concrete walls that are cutting and showing that we are different.— Alejandro Cartagena, Mexican photographer
Protest photography is quite boring visually, it always looks the same.— Rafal Milach, Polish photographer
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does a photography festival need a theme at all? Why not just show good photographs?
Because photography doesn't exist in a vacuum. The theme gives permission to ask what these images are actually about—what they're trying to say about the world. Reimagining is a way of asking: what happens when you look at something familiar and see it differently?
The border work by Cartagena seems to be about loss. The loss of identity.
Yes, but not in an abstract way. He's saying the wall doesn't just divide land. It turns people into ghosts. It erases the specificity of who they are. That's a very particular kind of violence.
And Abril's portraits of people in pain—that's a different kind of testimony, isn't it?
It is. She's making visible something that's usually hidden. Endometriosis is a condition that isolates people because it's not visible from the outside. By photographing the body in its actual postures of pain, she's saying: this is real, this is happening, this matters.
Milach seems frustrated with protest photography itself.
He is. He thinks it's become a cliché—the same images over and over. So instead of making more protest photographs, he's building a platform. He's thinking about how photographs can actually strengthen communities, not just document them.
Is that still photography, or is it something else?
It's photography in service of something larger. The photographs are the tool, but the real work is solidarity. That's what he's interested in.