PHotoEspaña, various locations, Spain

This year PHotoEspaña will focus on Spanish photography, highlighting the rich energy and diversity offered by photographers across the generations. Now in its 17th edition, the festival is an extensive affair, showcasing 440 artists across 108 exhibitions along with workshops, portfolio viewings, guided tours, screenings, a photobook fair and two competitions. Last year the festival was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts, a tribute that marks the end of one era for PHotoEspaña and the beginning of another: for the next three years the festival will focus on specific geographical areas to ensure a broad survey of local developments in photography is captured and to offer a different perspective and more multifacted view of photography.

The new programme seeks to give greater coverage to well-known photographers, but also to highlight the work of younger, less-known artists. This year a vast majority of the artists included will be from Spain, with the others hailing from 36 different countries around the world. The festival aims to surprise, to reappraise the work of certain groups and movements, and to highlight the photography of artists whose careers deserve to be more widely known. PHotoEspaña looks at the past, the present and the likely future, at the native side by side with the international, at well-known names alongside others hitherto largely unknown. It offers a major visual reflection on Spain as the meeting point for a variety of different approaches and creates a lively, organic self-portrait.

The exhibitions span across Madrid, Alcobendas, Cuenca Getafe, Alcalá de Henares and Zaragoza and demonstrate a range of themes and reflections from classical photographers surveying key periods in the history of Spanish photography to a retrospective of avant-garde artist, Arissa. For the first time, the festival will explore the relationship between Spanish Modernist architecture and photography, as well as the changes wrought by political episodes and mass-production in the country.

This year, for the first time, the programme will also include exhibitions in Almeria, Cadiz, Logrono, London and Toulouse.

PHotoEspaña 2014, 4 June – 27 July, various locations, Spain, www.phe.es.

Credits
1. Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Marilyn, 28 años, Las Vegas, Nevada 1990-1992. Courtesy of the artist.

Follow us on Twitter @AestheticaMag for the latest news in contemporary art and culture.