Letters to the Director is not an exhibition consisting of standard photographs that we are used to seeing from great photographers. Covering four floors and the ground floor of Madrid’s Sala del Canal de Isabel II, this installation is the ideal setting to reveal the approaches the photographer is trying to convey to visitors.
Access is reminiscent of the different areas of an old newspaper editorial office, where information is prepared and sometimes manipulated: in fact, participants can paste cut-out newspaper headlines over photographs that may or may not be related to their informative content.
The first floor is devoted to a sexual theme related to prostitution and the visual representation that the media has devoted to the subject. Photographs of brothel customers who tell their experiences to the photographer in exchange for money are exhibited. Nearly a hundred interviews are conducted in different parts of the world. Playing with reality and fiction, Cristina de Middel uses material from one of her first series, The Life and Mysteries of Paula P, about the double life of a young student devoted to prostitution, and a more recent series, Club of Gentlemen. (2018) where the testimonies of brothel users come from.
Another room is devoted to the immigration issue on the border of Mexico, which is considered the Center of the World, with the United States. Shot during the years of Donald Trump’s presidency, Cristina de Middel emphasizes that her aim is to highlight the heroism of people who leave their countries to survive in a hostile country.
The third floor is dedicated specifically to the war in Afghanistan, with the series The Kabuler, and here the mix between the real and the conceptual intensifies the power of the images.
The upper part is occupied by the so-called office of the newspaper’s director, where the voices of the protagonists of the news overlap and intertwine with the voices of the announcers and presenters of the news programs.
Life and miracles…
Finally, a reference to the exhibition catalogue, among other materials, archival photographs, a cardboard box containing reproductions of some of the exhibits, Paula P.’s book Life and Miracles, statements from some of the brothel customers, so-called Newspaper Letters to the Editor, with surprising or strange headlines, all original : “Roman amphorae were next to frozen hake”, “Spanish government is halting the return of football”, “Why are Spanish hairdressers so important”, “Japan is preparing for the arrival of UFOs”…
Between documentary and fiction
The projects of Cristina de Middel (Alicante, 1975) are more than series of photographs revolving around a theme. His work explores the ambiguous relationship between image and reality. Trained as a documentary photographer, his work achieved major international impact in 2012 with Afronautas, which covers Zambia’s crazy space program to put a man on the Moon (albeit not that crazy: Juan Forn’s dedication to him, Page 12 See article in ). I will remember it for you in the book).
In 2014, his TV series What Hate Did was based on a story by Nigerian Amos Tutola. Jan Mayen (2015) is devoted to an unsuccessful scientific-tourist expedition to this Arctic island at the beginning of the 20th century. In 2016, in collaboration with Bruno Morais, he exhibited his Midnight at the Crossroads series, about the African continent with an anti-colonial vision, at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid.
One of the first exhibitions of this photographer/artist that I had the opportunity to see at PhotoEspaña 2016 appealed to the art market with preserved copies of Middel’s previous works. These documentary photographs testified to the commercial logic of the network of fairs, institutions, exhibitions and curators. In 2017’s The Perfect Man, Cristina de Middel uses Chaplin’s Modern Times to talk about alienating work in India. In the PhotoEspaña 2018 call, he searched the archives of Magnum, the agency he currently heads, for entertaining photographs that transcend reality and question the serious truths Magnum presents in its documentary and photojournalistic works. His exhibition was titled Players and was curated by Martin Parr. There were photographs of Harry Gruyaert, Paollo Pelegrin, Chris Steele-Perkins, Peter Marlow, Richard Kalvar, Bruno Barbey, Cristina García Rodero, and Alex Majoli, which Middel used to break up the documentary and use fiction to illuminate the truth. This use of the game between fake and real, reality and fiction, in Fontcuberta’s orbit, was also included in the exhibition he presented at the Tabacalera in Madrid in 2019 with the Mayen, Alerta and Aleatoris vulgaris series and proposed the formulas. Resistance against dominant discourses. And this is the basis of Fantastic Pseudology, which he presented at the Museum of the University of Navarra in 2021: Dystopian worlds, fake news, manipulated images… It takes its name from a psychological disorder that encourages telling fantastic stories that the subject will eventually believe. In one of his latest exhibitions, Etcétera, he plays with archetypes, blurring the boundaries between the fictional and the real, using elements taken from his previous works.
National Photography Award 2017, Cristina de Middel lived in Uruapán (Mihoacán, Mexico) and currently lives in Brazil with her partner, photographer Bruno Morais. After dropping out of his law degree and enrolling in Fine Arts, he trained as a photographer in Nice and began working as a photojournalist in Ibiza and later for INFORMACIÓN newspaper. In 2022, he was appointed president of the Magnum agency, founded by Robert Capa and Cartier-Bresson.