“We must invite people to question what they see, to not swallow the photos without chewing, to understand what was the mechanism by which that image appeared right in front of their eyes,” proposes photographer Cristina de Middel in front of one of the works exhibited in “Dreams and faults”, his first exhibition in Buenos Aires. The meeting takes place at the ArtexArte gallery. De Middel has just landed in our country to be present at the inauguration.
The exhibition, curated by the Spanish Rafael Doctor Roncero, has the support of CCEBA (Cultural Center of Spain in Buenos Aires). And not only does he cover his main projects and photobooks, he also exposes two of his most important works in their entirety: “Afronautas” (2012), the series that changed his career and gave him notoriety inside and outside Spain and “Gentleman’s Club”, an investigation presented in 2023with which she toured several cities around the world investigating the practices surrounding female prostitution.
Born in Alicante, Valencia, in 1975; Cristina de Middel began her professional life studying photography and Fine Arts. Then, for a decade, he worked in the media as a photojournalist. In 2012, his project “Afronautas” meant a huge boost to his career and gave international significance to his work. In 2017 he won the National Photography Award. And in 2022, she was elected president of the famous Magnum Agencythe institution founded in 1947, at the end of the Second War, by the photographers Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and George Rodger. Until today, Magnum is the most important artistic cooperative in the world.
In the presentation of De Middel that the agency states on its website, it is described in these terms: “De Middel investigates the ambiguous relationship of photography with the truth. Combining documentary and conceptual photographic practices, it plays with reconstructions and archetypes to arrive at a more analytical understanding of the themes it addresses. Starting from the premise that the mass media is reducing our true understanding of the world in which we live, De Middel responds to the urgency of reimagining exhausted aesthetic tropes. and the insertion of opinion instead of facts.”
The photographer, who currently lives between Brazil, Mexico and Spain, travels the world regularly to carry out her projects.
The images
The photobook is the final object of De Middel’s research, a goal that requires long work times. “I was born in photojournalism, but the press went into crisis -he explained at the presentation of the sample-. Before there were 40 newspapers, now there are four. The amount of paper available to put things in has decreased. That’s why we now make photobooks and by making them we become responsible for how we communicate. We have many more things to decide when presenting that work.”
And his books cover a multitude of topics and situations: migration, prostitution, culture. He has worked with yellow journalism archives in Mexico and, in Rio de Janeiro, he has tried to unravel the way favelas are organized. He has recreated an expedition to the North Pole on an island in Scotland and has edited a lifestyle magazine to understand what hidden Afghanistan is like, which we do not know about in the West.
His look is always “other”. A way to enter topics from the least expected place. Or telling long stories in the instantaneous brevity of an image. Or to appeal to humor so as not to be torn by the harshness of human pain.
“Afronautas”, his most famous work, which has become a milestone in the history of photobooks, has a lot of all this. Conceived from an unusual piece of news: Zambia’s intention to intervene in the space race in the ’60s, it allowed De Middel to imagine protagonists, technologies, settings and landscapes for that story. “I started documenting how I imagined an African space program. And from there a lot of elements emerged, like the astronaut suit that is made with African fabrics. I didn’t have any budget. So I did everything very locally. For example, on the outskirts of Alicante. Or with retouched images of Africa and NASA,” explains the photographer.
The original project contemplated a girl with 10 cats traveling to space, a fact that added reasons to laugh. “I wondered why it was funny. If it had been a Yugoslav space program, it wouldn’t have been so funny. And the Yugoslavs had exactly the same chance as Zambia of going to the Moon,” says De Middel.
Winks, tricks and imagination to invent impossible scenes composed a work that surprised and caused a great impact in Spain. “The final image is what interests me the least. What interests me is the process, more than the result,” defines the photographer in relation to her way of working. “Photography, for me, is the perfect excuse,” he summarizes in the phrase that presents it in Magnum.
The darkness
The other work that is exhibited in Buenos Aires is called “Gentleman’s Club” and its theme is prostitution. The title alludes to the way in which brothels are called in the Anglo-Saxon world.
De Middel had already carried out research on this topic, around the figure of a woman. But when he started this new project he wanted to go for more. In principle, its intention was to break with the romanticization of prostitutes. Get out of the aestheticizing vision that had them as protagonists, in typical images of sordidness or seduction. His idea was to reverse the gaze and place it on the other component of the equation: the clients. Who they were, what they wanted, why they chose to have sex under these conditions.
The production began in Rio de Janeiro. De Middel published advertisements calling for men, regular clients of prostitutes, to participate in an artistic project. They received payment for their testimony and photography. “I interviewed these people. I first explained to them why I was going to photograph them and I warned them that they were giving me their image rights to make a book, exhibitions and publish in the press. We set a value and I paid them. This went against the basic laws of journalism, in which you cannot pay the people you interview. What I was also interested in was reversing the scene: I am going to pay you to give me something private, valuable, shameful because I need that information,” says De Middel.
This information, so accessible to men, was always forbidden to women. Therefore, their research allowed the creation of an archive that offered a tool for knowledgeable debate on the issue. “It would be a neutral file, because I don’t judge these people. In fact, if I entered the project with any opinion, I came out much more confused,” she explains.
The plan was to interview and photograph 100 men in different cities around the world. But each place presented different challenges. In some places men could not show their faces because prostitution was a crime. In others, the situation was unspeakable at the risk of being judged for lack of virility. Cuba, Bangkok, Mexico City, Kabul, Los Angeles and Amsterdam were some of the cities visited by the project. In the end, 99 men and only one woman were part of the experience.
Displayed as files in a file, each photograph is presented along with a text that reveals the situation of the registered client. Together, they are an overwhelming map of loneliness and emptiness. A particular compendium where marginality and taboos mix and confuse.
With her projects, Cristina de Middel enriched the ways of making art and photography, creating her own language to try to understand the world.
Image gallery
