PHotoEspaña, Madrid's International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, is one of the world's most important arts festivals. The city's museums, galleries and public buildings play host to exhibitions by photographers and artists from all over the world, with each year centred around a different theme.
2013's theme is Cuerpo. Eros y Políticas ('The Body. Eros and Politics').
There are 74 exhibitions involving 328 artists from 42 countries. One of the festival's main exhibition sites is the beautiful 1920s Círculo de Bellas Artes. I dropped in after work one evening to see one of the headline exhibitions, Mujer ('Woman').
Subtitled The Feminist Avant-Garde from the 1970s, the exhibition showcased 21 artists from the Sammlung Verbund collection in Vienna, which focusses on the feminist art movement in the 1970s.
The works are predominately centred around ideas of identity: women depicting their own bodies through their own eyes, rather than as a man's idealised image of a woman.
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| Ana Mendieta. Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints), 1972/1997 |
Also in the CBA was He, She, It. Dialogues between Edward Weston and Harry Callahan, which took the two great American photographers' works and placed them side by side.
Both Weston and Callahan famously depicted nudes and eroticism. The aim of the exhibition was to show that in many cases it was not their nudes that were erotic, often being very soft and affectionate, but their photographs of other subjects, which became erotic by suggestion and association.
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| Edward Weston, Floating Nude, 1939 |
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| Edward Weston, Nude, 1934 |
Another major location for the festival is Madrid's luscious botanical garden (a little photo essay of which I made here).
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Hidden away at the back of the gardens, through a vine-covered walkway, are two exhibitions. The first, Savoir c'est pouvoir ('Knowledge is Power'), focusses on the body as an ideological tool or political object.
These images are less about photography itself as an art, but more about delivering an unambiguous political message.
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| Manuela Marques, Sin título (Puños) / Untitled (Fists), 1999 |
The second exhibition was my far-out favourite. El cuerpo revelado ('The Body Revealed') is a series of different photographers' work from the Alcobendas Collection of Spanish art.
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| Juan Manuel Castro Prieto, 1993 |
The hugely varied images all touched upon the body as an individual, personal creation: the product of culture and society. Not all were explicitly about the nude human form; my favourite series were Luis Baylón's affectionate and witty black and white portraits of ordinary people in Madrid, which are worth the trip alone.
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| Luis Baylón, Freud, 1990 |
Woman until 1 September 2013, all other exhibitions until 28 July 2013.
