On the 9th of June, the 13th edition of PHotoEspaña opened the doors of various Madrilenian spaces to a total of 69 shows on photography and visual arts. The formula has become one of Spain’s most important cultural events, supported by the city authorities, its cultural institutions - from the Reina Sofia to the Circulo de Bellas Artes - and the many private and corporate sponsors, who are evident in a five-page-long logo sum-up in the catalogue. For this year, organiser La Fabrica has a total budget of €3.4m to exceed the nearly 700,000 visitors of the last edition. The festival also has tentacles to Cuenca and Lisbon that organise parallel exhibitions.

For his third and final edition as the festival’s general curator, Lisbon-based Sérgio Mah has devoted his selections to the notion of ‘Time’. As he explains,‘PhotoEspaña 2010 (PHE10) aims to bring together a diverse group of artists who, having different technical, aesthetic and conceptual leanings, deal with the experience of time in its various meanings and visual forms. Works created in the media of photography, cinema and installation predominate, making up an extended and paradigmatic spectrum of visual practices.’ At the base of the thematic programme is what Mah calls ‘the theoretical and narrative paradoxes of photography’, which are utilised ‘in order to delimit a propitious space for temporal intuitions, idiosyncrasies and drifts that allude to the phenomenological, empirical, political, psychological and fictional. In this terrain of interstices, the aim is to intensify perception through an attentive and reflexive experience of the image’.

Among the colourful bunch of photographers and visual artists taking part are Harold Edgerton, Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, Tacita Dean, Oscar Muñoz, Helen Levitt, David Claerbout, Bleda y Rosa, Juergen Teller, Jeff Wall, Isabel Muñoz, Ignasi Aballí, Daniel Blaufuks, Roman Signer and Erwin Wurm - as you can see, some are more alive than others. Française Claude Bussac, the festival’s director over the last four years, names the exhibitions of Oscar Muñoz and Helen Levitt has her personal favourites.

One piece of advice is to alternate your exhibition visits with minor detours to the nearest tapas bars: a guaranteed way to avoid visual indigestion.

Words: Walter Bettens