The cracks of the United States revealed in 83 photographs

BarcelonaThe darkest side of 20th-century America: boredom, loneliness, racial segregation, and inequality. Photographer Robert Frank marked a turning point in the history of photography with Americans, a photo album with which he revealed the fractures of North American society. He said he wanted to make the invisible visible. His photographs are full of downcast gazes and anonymous characters, those who do not usually appear in photographs. There are also many record players,which the poet Allen Ginsberg said looked like hearses. "My photographs speak of the anxiety and misery of people on the social periphery, of black and white, of a sometimes evident despair," said Frank. The book stirred up a storm among the most conservative and they branded it anti-American. The 83 photographs that make it up, out of the 28,000 he took, can be seen for the first time in Spain at the Telefónica Foundation in Madrid in one of the main exhibitions of the 29th edition of the PhotoEspaña festival. "The American flags mark the four parts of the book, but they are always wrinkled, or even dirty," points out Maria Brancós, head of exhibitions and collections at the Telefónica Foundation. "Frank subverts American symbols and uses clichés in a very passionate way," points out Brancós. "The Americans is a very brave act, it marked Frank for life", he adds.

To do Americans, Frank visited more than 45 states over two years, sometimes accompanied by his wife and two children. He reached inhospitable places and had to work covertly, and was arrested twice. The photograph that closes the book, particularly moving, is a portrait of the family inside the car on a roadside ditch, transformed into desolate characters like those in other images. The exhibition, which will be open until November 1, has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, which has lent an entire set of photographs. The curator is David Campany, an expert in Robert Frank's photography. The exhibition includes several complementary prints owned by the International Center of Photography in New York and by private collectors.

Without leaving the United States, the Mapfre Foundation is hosting until August 26 an exhibition of another iconic work, In the American West (1985), by Richard Avedon, one of the most important photo books of the late 20th century. It is the first time that the 110 portraits from the book, selected from over a thousand waitresses, vagrants, truck drivers, oil rig workers, miners, farmers, butchers, and fairground workers, can be seen in Europe, at a time marked by the oil crisis of the 70s and subsequent deindustrialization. Avedon shares with Frank the desire to give visibility to the humblest. "They are invisible people, but they are the ones who move the world, who do the work," states Clément Chéroux, director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation and curator of the exhibition.

These are portraits taken very close up, without artifice. Chéroux points out that a "silent dialogue" was created between Avedon and the models, but not all the subjects were equally receptive. Some have an indignant attitude; others seem to struggle to contain their emotion. "Avedon worked with very important models and brands, but at the same time, throughout his career, he made observations about the culture of the United States, the state of the country, and where it was heading. He had a deep interest in the country's reality," notes Chéroux, who in the installation highlights the sequential nature of the book.

Coinciding with In the American West, the Mapfre Foundation is also presenting an exhibition by the Mexican photographer born in the Dominican Republic, Alejandro Cartagena, known for his experimental approach to themes related to migration, the demographic explosion of Monterrey, and life on the border between Mexico and the United States. Among his best-known series is Carpoolers, made up of dozens of images of workers traveling to work in the back of a pickup truck, seen from a highway overpass. This series was born from a family memory. "My grandfather was a bricklayer. As a child, I saw him go to work like that. His colleagues would arrive, and they would get in the back of his Ford 150. The project speaks of resilience, of doing whatever it takes to survive, to bring bread home, even if they are in a vulnerable place. There's an accident there and they all die," says Cartagena, who wants to present "alternative stories" of Mexico: "These are stories that won't be told, and that I decide to look at".

The creative power of photography

Under the motto "Reimagining", this edition of PhotoEspaña includes nearly a hundred exhibitions, more than 40 of which are in the official section, featuring works by more than 300 artists, 65% women and 35% men. The vast majority of exhibitions are open until September 13. "This edition is a vindication of photography as a creative machine," states the director, María Santoyo, who also considers delving into "the limits of photography" to combat the visual saturation of the current world. Beyond Madrid, PhotoEspaña's program includes exhibitions in Gijón, Santander, Seville, Valencia, Zaragoza, and Barcelona, where the Kbr center of the Mapfre Foundation is exhibiting until September 6 the most ambitious retrospective dedicated to the North American photographer Minor White (1908-1976), the result of years of research in his archive. “White is known primarily for rather introspective sequences, but many of the exhibition's photographs reveal an artist who could do it all,” says Carlos Gollonet, photography curator at the Mapfre Foundation and exhibition curator.

Photographer and writer Laia Abril is known for ambitious, long-term international projects. In this edition of PhotoEspaña, she takes a turn with a small-scale project made in Spain, but equally poignant: Endometriosis. The silenced pain 1860–2026,at the Museum of Romanticism (until September 13), a denunciation of the fact that endometriosis continues to be a poorly researched disease. She herself suffers from it, and connects with the protagonists of the photographs, six women and one trans man, with their tears, with which the photographs are varnished. That these people are photographed from above is very significant. "When I thought about how to visualize them, I remembered myself and the fact that, at night, amid the pain, everything becomes so absurd that you have an out-of-body experience –explains Abril–. You see yourself from above saying that the situation is ridiculous, almost comical, because you have the feeling that it cannot be happening, that it makes no sense. It is a struggle between the body, which helps us to be resilient and to fight pain, and the moment when this same body suffers greatly".

The relationship with the wounded territory

Another of the thematic lines of this edition of PhotoEspaña is the relationship with the territory. And following the serious fires in Catalonia, Madrid, and Ávila, Raphaëlle Peria's exhibition at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, titled Ruina montium [Open-pit mine or collapse of mountains], is unfortunately timely. Peria does not define herself as a photographer, but she manipulates photographs taken by herself of Las Médulas, in León, a site recognized as a World Heritage Site that was devastated by a serious fire last summer. Specifically, Peria makes incisions in the shape of blades of grass on the surface of the photograph to reveal the white paper underneath. For her, white is "the color of memories," and with her gesture, she wants to transport Las Médulas to a moment before the fire. And memory excludes Peria from thinking about the future, as this white grass could also be an image of this place when it has recovered.