The raw material for the narrative in WHERE? is a paradoxical, multiform, ambiguous account of the human species’ habitat. Paradoxical is its representation of three-dimensional ruggedness, protuberances and cavities on media that are either two-dimensional (photography) or abstract (text). The non-neutral ambiguity of photography lies in its use for depiction equidistant between denunciation and aesthetic pleasure. Such an alchemical mix of ethics, aesthetics and abstraction affords an innovative and communicable perspective of the territory. WHERE? is not a book of landscapes per se, but a hybrid of photographs and texts in pursuit of readers interested in the past and the future of humanity’s relations with its habitat. 

Technology in its various manifestations determines visual perception and replaces direct observation of reality with conceits and models that simplify and dramatise it. Photography, one of these technologies, offers the most generous options for this understanding thanks to its quasi-mysterious feat of compressing three-dimensional reality into two-dimensional artefacts. These pictures face the challenge of portraying deserts, mountains, trees, rivers and human structures in a printed book, so their understanding can be improved and turned into aesthetic pleasure. 

WHERE? resorts to the fruitful interaction between texts and images to illustrate photographically the essential conceits of visual syntax —point, line, plane, shape, volume and motion—, as well as the dynamising tools of fixed image —sequences, zooms, fractals, changes of scale and redundancies. These attempts on visual theory end up photographing antagonistic notions such as instability–balance, determination–non-determination, calm–stress, complexity–simplicity. The permanent exchange between abstraction and concretion on the visual sphere rounds up in the second part of the book with an inventory that splits the territory into anthropological and geographical morphologies. To sum up, the aim of WHERE? is to prove that certain ways of taking photographs can help to understand and portray the kaleidoscopic diversity of the territory.

"There is no rush in Sintes’s images. Even the old man feeding the pigeons seems to have all the time in the world". Magdalena Tirado (Writer)

"Amid blacks and whites, Sintes reveals his Lisbon to us: one that seems like “La Rodrigues”. A Lisbon recognised by all which, however, tastes special. Yes, taste. His work is not seen, it is rather chewed, heard, remembered… and it has the virtue of transporting the observer to the most humble neighbourhoods, to the less common places and the less past times. A past present, a failed technicolour and “a sewing machine of sorrows, as “La Rodrigues” would say. This is Sintes’ Lisbon". Beatriz Alonso (Journalist)

"Miguel Angel is shy; his photographic geography is already ample. He has conveyed his knowledge in many exhibitions; he has won numerous prizes and has silently found his own way. I remember with admiration the El País prize-winner that presented us an everlasting image of what Spain was in 1995. Sintes showed us the streets where the outlines that make us imagine, have a feeling beyond what is photographed. He captures nostalgia, like a reporter who wanders among the stone pavements, walls and amusements, observing life with the plenitude of someone who waits. Sintes manages to transmit the impression of a farewell, a hope or an encounter". José Luis Miranda Cruz (Poet, Professor of Spanish Language and Literature)

"His photographs seem real, they transmit truthfulness. The photographer directs his view with a great intimate charge. He does not have one subject only, as he portrays people in the street as well as daily scenes or landscapes. The difference is made by his sensitivity, which transmits closeness". Concha Alcántara (Diario Menorca)

Miguel Angel Sintes Puertas is a photographer of intimate features who still processes his photographs with photochemical procedures. He carries out the whole process (shooting, developing and printing) entirely by himself. In the book enCLAVEdePortugal he discovers the Lisbon he dreamt in his youth, a noble Lisbon, melancholic and grey like all those decadent metropolises far from a past splendour.

Magdalena Tirado is a writer and lecturer. She writes novels, short stories, literary columns and poems. At present, she is a lecturer at the Escuela de Escritores de Madrid. Her first novel, Los que lloran solos, was finalist in the Juan Pablo Forner contest in 2002. With El corazón de las estatuas (2007) she achieved the consolidation of her personal novelistic view. She has published short stories in several anthologies and her short story Lisboa was finalist in the Mario Vargas Llosa contest – NH in 2001.

As a meeting place between photography and writing this book emerges, within the framework of PhotoEspaña 2016, from the collaboration between two centres of artistic and theoretical production that flank the cultural fabric of Madrid. In its pages seven resident photographers from Casa de Velázquez, a French institution dedicated to research and creation, meet up with seven writers from one of the historic associations of artists, critics and theorists of the independent panorama in this city: CRUCE.. The photographs and essays contained in this publication do not correspond to a standard catalogue but they constitute, from different approaches (philosophy, history of art or psychoanalysis), a fragmentary thinking about word and image, reformulating with it the exhibition format as a meeting and debating place.

Antonio Barroso, Paco López, Vicky Méndiz, Maria-do-Mar Rêgo, Vincent Sáez, Anna Katharina Scheidegger, Aurore Valade, Ana Ara, Pablo L. Álvarez, Daniel Lesmes, Cayetano Limorte, Jordi Massó, Arantxa Romero, Laura Suárez.

This book is the result of a wish and a city. The wish of the author, thought out at length, of taking photographs with the aim of leaving a testimony of the life passing in the streets at the time he has chanced to live; and the city, mythical, Paris, in which the fragility and the contradictions of the human being become its main protagonists.

In different periods, especially from September 2001 till January 2004, Patricio Rodríguez (Ponferrada, Spain, 1972; co-author of the photobook Prestige 42º15’N-12º08’W) lived in the region of Paris. Through his visual and written diaries he revises the daily experiences that marked him the most. They are the first years of a new and convulsive century in which all the social values that were believed to be guaranteed are somehow questioned. Perhaps in no other city the echoes of the pains of the world resound with such intensity and clarity as in the streets of Paris.

The book is divided into four chapters of images, connected by the reflections and impressions collected in the texts. The first three chapters represent the principal values on which the French republic rests (liberty, equality and fraternity), already transformed in foundations of any state under the rule of law. The fourth chapter includes a concept in debtor of the other three, which today more than ever is in the permanent centre of debate about the construction of any free and democratic society: identity.

The shared interest of Carmela Alcolea and Mª Luisa Assens in the world of images and landscapes makes them to unify their paths and to give shape to this project, Tropos. Nature and its metaphors creating a dialogue between opposed ways of constructing. But, as two perpendicular lines share a point, their gazes participate in the same lived experience, of images they have travelled apprehending them, trying to isolate them conscious or unconsciously.

The photographic activity of Mª Luisa Assens is intimately related to travel, considering this as a process of estrangement from oneself, like the need of going far to discern, but also of leaving to come back. Paradoxically, in Carmen Alcolea’s images the simulation of virtual worlds which refer to a dialogue between illusion and nature is implicit.

Both are games which demonstrate that appearance and fantasy are determinant in the world of art.

Les Spectaculaires is part of a wider artistic project, Womankind, the most intimate and intuitive work of Maria Maria Acha-Kutscher. The successive series of photocollages that are joining up in this project offer a subtle rereading of the image of modern woman constructed by photography. Her complex cultural identity, with Creole, Chinese and African roots on one hand, and a legendary world, with dreamlike tinges, transmitted by her grandmother Irmgard, of German origin and exiled from Nazism on the other, come out in the compositions.

The series Les Spectaculaires is special within the artist’s line of work. The protagonists are women who were affected by some type of ‘abnormality’. Women with an exceptional physical condition that makes them unique, like lacking arms or legs, being too short or too tall, having a hairy face or the joint bodies of Siamese sisters. The original photographs, on which the author worked, are from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when these women were still working in circuses, where they exhibited as human oddities. Paradoxically, many of them enjoyed a more comfortable and independent life than they would have expected in the case of having been born ‘normal’. The collages created by Maria Maria Acha-Kutscher have a hypnotising visual intensity. The Spectaculaires are invested with great dignity, in restrained images, where the artist has done few manipulations, but precise and subtle. She only uses the strictly necessary manipulations to defy conventions about women’s body, built from the male perspective, and to establish a series of disturbing relationships between the ideas of beauty, illness, violence and power.

Prominent architect and indispensable critic in the Italy of the inter-war period, Guisepe Pagano found, almost by chance, that photography was one of the passions of his life. Commissioned with the mounting of an exhibition on rural architecture, Pagano started travelling around Italy taking photos of its architecture and landscapes. Since then and until his death, in a concentration camp, nothing escaped his omnivorous gaze.