Washington Through the Lens of Five Spanish Photographers
In a collaboration that bridges two continents, five Spanish photographers bring a fresh gaze to Washington, DC. The group includes Rosell Meseguer from Alicante, Paula Anta, Juan Baraja, Nicolás Combarro, and Jesús Madriñán. Their work is presented in Madrid at the former Ambassadors’ Residence, marking a vivid dialogue between the Spanish capital and the United States through photography. The exhibition accompanies the book DC.es, created by Factory, and is showcased after a recent Madrid premiere. The project invites viewers to see the political capital of the world from the perspectives of five artists who use photography to reveal different facets of the city and its personality. Each photographer frames the city in a distinct way, offering a layered portrait of Washington as a symbol, a space, and a living organism of power and culture.
In Rosell Meseguer’s practice the city is described through its vegetative life and its structures, merging botanical ideas with political themes in a project that binds nature to power. The body of work is titled City of Power, City of Trees, a herbarium of Washington created by an artist who gathers and reinterprets plant life across the metropolis and transfers those observations into cyanotype images. This approach reveals how flora can echo the city’s influence and its historical narratives, turning plants into a language for urban memory.
Rosell Meseguer’s scientific art travels to the Botín Center
What unfolds is a symbolic ritual that connects the presidency to the landscape. The series explores the relationship between U.S. leaders and the factories and infrastructures that shape national life, using a blend of botanical imagery and political context. Meseguer explains that the project began with a botanist’s curiosity about the city’s flora. He studied a comprehensive botany book of Washington, then collected and re-identified plants to assemble a personal herbarium that remains open-ended and evolving. The work reveals how political power can be read in the careful arrangement of living material and its photographic representation.
Among the featured species are capitol oaks, conifers from Arlington Cemetery, Saucer Magnolia, White House flora, Watergate Building plant life, and cherry blossoms presented as a tidal basin tribute from Japan. These elements tie a national narrative to the natural world, illustrating how trees and plants have traveled through history alongside political events and monuments.
The artist notes that themes of history, power, and politics recur across his projects, often alongside hisbaria. He emphasizes that he continues to work with botanical imagery and cyanotype photography, a monochrome negative-print method. He has used cyanotypes since 1996 and even established an analog laboratory in Washington to realize this project. He cites Anna Atkins, a pioneer of seaweed photography, as a source of inspiration for his practice and recalls the first herbarium he built during a scholarship from the Royal Academy in Rome, years ago. The new body of work extends that lineage, blending scientific observation with artistic interpretation.
The exhibition, showcasing seven cyanotypes from a larger set and a series of black-and-white photograms of additional plants, invites visitors to consider how delicacy and power coexist in the same image. The curator notes that the photography highlights a contrast between the fragility of cyanotypes and the robustness of the location, inviting reflection on how context shapes perception.