Cristina de Middel: "I didn't like the moral superiority of war photographers when it came to depicting the world."

BarcelonaCristina de Middel is one of our most international photographers. A precocious National Photography Prize winner at the age of 42, she is currently presenting a selection of the work she has been doing for approximately fifteen years on the African continent at the Seltz gallery in Barcelona on November 15th. The works hang on the gallery walls in mural sequences arranged like large pages that could be read like comic book panels. Waterfalls, the title of the exhibition, is polysemous. It refers to the eye disease that occurs due to wear and tear, like a curtain that obscures vision. Wear and tear on the gaze from having seen so much. It also alludes to the cascade of images and reels that fall through the internet and social media, eternally, without interruption. A cascade that wears us down and veils us. Disinformation or information overload, which ends up disturbing our ability to see clearly, to understand what's happening in the contemporary world and why.

Cataracts can be cured... But perhaps in the West our problem is endemic myopia. Are we unable to focus?

— Maybe. After so many years of traveling and observing the streets and people of Africa, I still haven't understood what's going on. I've photographed Africa not to make it known, but to understand it myself. Although I don't think I'll ever understand it. It's vast, unfathomable.

The photographs of the series Lookout are an image of that blindness.

— This series is the result of photographing through a taxi window during a forty-minute tour of the market in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria. For me, it was the only way to photograph that reality so often photographed by others. Going out onto the street with my camera would have completely changed the outcome. I would become a walking dollar walking among those people. All eyes would be on me; that magical randomness of everyday life, where everyone goes about their own business, would end.

Africa has been one of the most photographed territories, where the most reporters have tested "their style."

— Yes. I haven't forgotten. I was drawn to the work of the great reporters in Africa. I know them and I respect them.

But the language is not the same...

— I started in the press. There I learned to write with images. Imitation was important, like in Fine Arts school, when you have to paint grayscale and still lifes and copy the classics to learn. In photography, perhaps also at the beginning, it's necessary to pay attention to framing, focus, lighting, black and white, etc., imitating classic photographers, those of black and white. Following a documentary correction. But at some point, that language exhausts you. What else is there? When you've already tested yourself in all that and given everything that was required of you, something more important begins: the meaning of your work. What to say. How to say it. It's not just about covering the facts, but understanding them, creating images to explain them. Will they be intelligible to those I would like to be their recipients?

For Africans, in that case? Are you worried about their intelligibility?

— Of course. I did a commissioned work for the Lagos Photo Festival: the story of Fela Kuti's mother. This exhibition includes several photographs from that work, which is still ongoing. It took me a long time to depict those events. I think the work could be understood as the retelling of a myth: that of a woman who finally manages to exact revenge on those who hurt her.

The image is quite comical, at first glance...

— Yes, it is. And its production was a real catharsis of laughter. Although this series, Unknown Soldier, part of a terrible true story. In 1978, hundreds of soldiers stormed the house where singer Fela Kuti's mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was staying and threw her out the window. After a supposed investigation, the government determined that the culprit was "an unknown soldier." I decided to photograph the precise moment in which this unknown soldier floats through the void after being thrown out, while specific women watch from their windows. Each photograph in the series was carefully curated: the women stand in front of their windows, representing themselves. And the soldiers wear military uniforms that we secretly rented for a few hours. The disguised soldiers jumped on a trampoline, and the victims' faces were made to convey the drama of the fall. The process turned out to be a rather comical performance that seeks to resolve a situation of sustained infamy through the revenge exercised by those women who feared the soldiers who raped, kidnapped, and abused them. Concrete soldiers of their bad governments. The final chapter of this work, yet to be completed, is a portrait of African women behind the wheel.

Poetic justice. Or animistic magic... Your work can't be understood without humor. We can't hold back our laughter, even at the most serious topics...

— For me, a sense of humor is a means of expression. I couldn't live without it. It's important to eliminate ceremony when approaching topics and situations. I practice creative irreverence. Everything can be analyzed and parodied.

Your images have had to find their place in the art gallery. I imagine that creativity was what, little by little, distanced you from the media...

— I left the news media because there was no room for it. What space was there to express my opinion? On the one hand, there was the news, which was the space reserved for photography. And on the other, opinion pieces. The problem in the press is that truth is confused with reality. That's why photography, to which this quality of truthfulness is attributed, is never allowed to occupy the space of opinion, which is supposedly subject to subjectivity. But this "truth" distilled in the press is still a possible formulation of reality. What cannot be denied is reality, which exists and is there. Everything else is just different ways of expressing it.

How did you take the step of trying this other way of explaining reality?

— Classic reportage photography is based on the impact produced by the photographer's intervention. It's essential that the photographer be a witness, that he always projects his physical point of view onto the environment. He's a hero who endures difficulties, conflicts, who puts his life in danger and returns triumphantly with a reportage. When I heard war photographers recount their stories at conferences, while I was training to become a photographer, I thought: "I'll never be like that." I didn't like that moral superiority when it came to explaining the world. The feeling of being on the right side of history. I felt uncomfortable with that way of mythologizing a job that, for me, was a service, like the kind a surgeon might perform. We would be very surprised to hear a surgeon speak of his work with this epic emphasis. Why aren't we shocked to hear photographers speak like that?

Why have we assimilated that photographers and reporters have something of a mythological hero in them?

— Indeed. The first to behave this way was Robert Capa, the inventor of the heroic dimension of the war reporter. A brilliant photographer, yes. But he is worshipped independently of his work, for his way of facing life, of putting it at risk. Even today, young photographers still have that cliché in their minds. They want to travel at all costs to a country in conflict. And I ask them: what are you going to look for there? What will you bring back besides photographs? Do you already have a story? Because moving doesn't make sense. Surely a photographer from that place can give a more coherent account of the events. To work as a reporter, you have to have something to tell; you can't just go looking for it just in case it turns up.

Today, people read little and watch a lot, so ideas quickly fall into stereotypes and copying.

— The truth is, I don't trust the new generations much. But I understand the disorientation of young people. Today, there's a lack of role models, those people with ideas that moved the 20th century, truly inspiring people. Those leaders like Che Guevara, like Gandhi... These new heroes are missing for the 20th century. The moment someone on the left appears who can surprise, with their own voice, with different ideas, they are destroyed and persecuted until they disappear. Only those on the far right survive, protected by thousands of blind followers on social media, ready to mobilize.

The great harm of these discourses is denialism. That's why it's so important to maintain the reality of the facts. Could there be opinion without facts?

— What are facts without opinion? I'm not surprised by the image of the world being generated by AI, which supposedly is born free of real facts. There's a lack of ideas, a lack of curiosity. There's a lack of imagination on the part of those who use it. The most they can come up with is pink unicorns? Things that grow fur? A car with fur! What do we desire? What intrigues us? To see what furry things would look like? There's little surprise in all this. Reality is much more astonishing. It's a treasure for the imagination. My fictions feed on reality. For this very reason, the product of my work can confuse people. Reality is not what people understand as "truth," the judicial proof that something "so and so" happened. This truth, expressed in a fixed and invariable way, is still a self-serving, directed expression of reality. Facts still weigh, they still push.

But, nowadays, with so much noise on the networks, where everyone has an opinion... What exactly do you mean by giving an opinion?

— Opinion is nothing more than expressing one's own experience. What one has lived through the facts. It's increasingly important to work, to narrate from one's own experience. Without experience, one cannot penetrate reality. Subjectivism is making a strong comeback these days. But it's important to distinguish between this self-experience and speaking only about oneself. It's about speaking about the world from one's own experience. [...] I'm having a conversation like a Paulo Coelho self-help book. These coffee-table philosophies...

How did it feel to wield so much power at the Magnum agency, with so many great and memorable photographers under your command, you, a young woman?

— Well, the previous president was also a woman, Olivia Arthur. But she was very discreet. I never felt I was exercising power in the way a leader might be understood. In any case, I dared to try to change things a little. It all happened so fast! My appointment came when I was still learning. It was like going from knowing nothing to leading. From being an apprentice in the profession, I went to managing an entire company. It was a very extreme leap. From one day to the next, I became a member and was immediately elected president of the agency. Being president of Magnum meant having a lot of work. I had to do things I never imagined I'd have to do, like finding myself in the position of calling Steve McCurry to give a warning—Steve McCurry! Or, a week after taking office, having to write an obituary for the death of Elliot Erwitt. In a way, at Magnum, I learned how to treat grandfather as "you." It wasn't a lack of respect for the elders, but a gesture of trust between us.

Why do you think they chose you?

— It was a surprise to me, but I can share it with you. I was the necessary stone to bridge a still-under-construction bridge between the documentary and the conceptual. Perhaps because of my last name, Middel, I've always been in the middle. I was asked from both sides to establish a dialogue between the classic reporting of the early days and this new way of narrating reality, closer to subjectivism and fiction, that was emerging recently.

I can imagine the pressure and also having to deal with the corporate world...

— I never wanted to lose the playful spirit of my tenure so I could work with more freedom, without so much pressure. I think I've helped facilitate the entry of freer, more creative voices. But the financial issue was very important, overwhelming. If previously, documentary sales accounted for 80% of the agency's income, today it's less than 10%. We had to reinvent ourselves, create courses and scholarships, look for other commercial outlets, and establish links with other companies. There's not just a media crisis in demand for photography. They asked me for everything. I had to reach everywhere. I learned a lot. Last June, my term as president of Magnum ended, after I had already extended it a bit. Now I realize how the pressure has eased, with these emails now only numbering 20. Now I'm freer to get back to what I do.

And what's on your mind now?

— I now live in Brazil, in Salvador de Bahia, which is like a mirror of Africa, where I had been, Nigeria, in the corner that, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, fits in with its shape. The population there is 90 percent African-descended. But there's that cultural gateway left by the Portuguese that allows me to understand a little more, to have keys to approach Africa. I've bought a large house, a space no bigger than this one, where I will create a photography center.

How was your decision to stay in Brazil?

— It was by chance, well, because I fell in love. He was also my project partner, Bruno Morais, with whom I carried out the long project. Midnight at the Crossroads, with which we traveled through the countries on the journey that the spirit of Èsù accompanied enslaved people from the African continent, specifically Benin, to the New World: Haiti, Cuba, and finally, Brazil. Èsù was demonized by the missionaries of the official religion. Our images demonstrate the different forms and characters that Èsù took on in different territories: in Benin, he is a totem, in Cuba, a child, a young man in Brazil, and finally, an old man in Haiti. Always changing. He is the messenger and also the lord of crossword puzzles, due to his symbolism. That's why there are so many twins here (and he points to the room) and so many opposing forces.

And this installation, Cristina, is it a surplus work? [Framed photographs are piled up in the center of the room.]

— These are copies of my photographs that have traveled through exhibitions. I thought the pile would get much higher still. I was wrong! The public gets used to images and then always wants to see the same thing. This causes wear, not only on the gaze, but on the images themselves. I put this repetition to the test in the exhibition. A lot, where I collected the images of my photography that collectors and curators had requested over the years. The photographs echoed each other. There comes a time when they become mute; they no longer say anything.

With them you have been able to make a...

— Of course not! We should rid the world of sculptures. We already have enough with images, which are lighter and more suggestive.