The 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.

A group of trans women momentarily head a protest on Barcelona's Rambla. Fists raised, shouts immortalized in the expression on their faces, and a banner with the slogan "We are not afraid, we are us"just behind you. It is one of the images that captured the photographer Isabel Steva Hernández, known as Colita (1940-2023)"At first I wasn't aware of the danger, but we did attract attention," explains Sofia, who was walking in the group of "the transvestites, as we were called then," and ended up being hit, in addition to the insults and mockery from some pedestrians. The Government delegate in Madrid, Núria Marín, recalled that "the law on dangerousness and social rehabilitation" was still in force and highlighted that Colita put "her camera at the service of the cultural, social, and political transformation of our country." The exhibition's curator, Rafael Doctor, insisted that it is "100% pertinent" for the exhibition to take place now, in full swing of a far-right that endangers conquered rights and "freedom with a capital F." After its stop in Madrid, the exhibition will move to the old Model prison in the Catalan capital, which is precisely where some of the people who participated in the protest photographed by Colita ended up, and which is relived almost fifty years later.