PHOTOESPAÑA 2004 - Historias

PHotoEspaña 2004 will be inaugurated on 2 June with a total of 51 exhibitions. Important museums, exhibition centres and art galleries will participate, and, for the first time, the Prado Museum will join the Festival.

The central theme of the Festival, Historias, speaks of the present and highlights the value of the new documentary languages in contemporary art. More than 170 artists present their works in PHE04.

PHotoEspaña opens its programme to the Visual Arts: cinema, video and plastic arts related to photography are now on the Festival’s schedule. As of this edition, PhotoEspaña has become the International Festival of Photography and the Visual Arts.

Coinciding with the Festival, the I PHE Film Week presents 13 films from 12 countries and the II Encuentros PHE. Discussions on photography will welcome speakers of 11 nationalities.


The seventh edition of PhotoEspaña 2004, the International Festival of Photography and the Visual Arts, will be held in Madrid from 2 June to 18 July. Madrid will become anew the world capital of photography for six weeks as Spanish and international photographers, visual artists, critics and experts take part in this programme of exhibitions and activities.

PHotoEspaña 2004 is titled Historias, a theme chosen by Horacio Fernández, the festival’s new artistic director. The approach behind Historias is reflected in the 28 exhibitions located in the art centres and guest spaces that compose the Official Section’s programme. The main innovation in this section is the incorporation of the Prado Museum, which participates for the first time in PHotoEspaña.

PHotoEspaña 2004 will focus on the new documentary languages. In recent years, photography, films and videos have used diverse types of narrative discourse to convey their messages. In Historias, PHotoEspaña 2004 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.

PHotoEspaña has confirmed its welcome to visual practices by changing its denomination to International Festival of Photography and the Visual Arts. Thus photography sacrifices part of its preeminence to other disciplines such as cinema, video, painting or design. This is clear both in an exhibition programme that contains more proposals from these fields that employ photography and images, and in the I PHE Film Week, directed by Pablo Llorca, a guest curator in the Festival.

Selected Solo Exhibitions
Rineke Dijkstra
Dennis Adams
Enrique Metinides
Yvonne Venegas
Nicolás Goldberg
Basilio Martín Patino
Pedro G. Romero
Marta de Gonzalo
Publio Pérez Prieto
Pedro Ortuño
Luis Gordillo
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil
Jean Moral
Naia del Castillo
Paul Graham
Montserrat Soto
Lucía Arjona
Enrique Méndez de Hoyos
Pedro Álvarez
Javier Campano
Isidro Blasco
Joachim Schmid
Juan Cabré Aguiló
Uschi Huber
Daniel Blaufuks
Eduardo Valderrey
Motohiko Odani
Grete Stern
Matthias Müller
Mario Cravo Neto


Selected Group Exhibitions

Adolf Mas, Alvin Langdon Coburn and José Ortiz Echagüe Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cecilio Paniagua, Gabriel Casas and José Suárez. Misiones Pedagógicas (Teaching Missions), John Heartfield, Walter Reuter and Jalón Ángel, W. Eugene Smith, Robert Frank, Oriol Maspons, Gabriel Cualladó, Virxilio Vieitez and Carlos Pérez Siquier. Luis Gordillo, Juan Hidalgo, Carlos Pazos and Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Cristina García Rodero and Joan Fontcuberta.

Anri Sala / Oliver Chanarin y Adam Broomberg / Mitch Epstein / Ori Gerscht / Zineb Sedira

Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Christian Boltanski, Robert Capa, Equipo Crónica, Jirí David, Ad Van Denderen, Luc Delahaye, Gosbert Gottmann, Stanley Greene, Richard Hamilton, John Heartfield, Malcolm Morley, Gustav Klucis, Wang Quinsong, Gerhard Richter, José Renau, Simeón Saiz, Paul Schuitema, P. Elaine Sharpe and Francesc Torres, among other artists, as well as political posters, portraits of outstanding celebrities, press images and other unique historical documents.

Atom Egoyan / David Cronenberg / Mike Hoolboom / Guy Maddin / Donigan Cumming / Michael Snow / Marcel Dzama

Jean Laurent, Charles Clifford and Jean Lacoste

Runa Islam / Emily Jacir / Chen Chieh-Jen /Kutlug Ataman / Eija-Liisa Ahtila / Walid Raad & The Atlas Club /The Center for Land Use & Interpretation

Paco Almengló / Carmen Calvo /Joan Fontcuberta / Miquel Navarro/ Andrés Nagel/ Rosa Muñoz

Marc Quinn/ Thomas Struth/ Anish Kapoor/ Ori Gersht/ Kyoichi Tsuzuki / Naysmith/ Bill Brandt