Cristina García Rodero. España Oculta
An undisputed master of contemporary photography, García Rodero (Puertollano, 1949) is the recipient of countless distinctions, including Spain’s National Photography Prize in 1996, the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Art in 2005 and the Gold Medal of Merit in Labour in 2014. Since her beginnings, she has clocked up thousands of kilometres in a tireless, passionate pursuit of images that faithfully capture the boundless spectacle of life and the bond humans maintain with age-old rituals and traditions, somewhere between the spiritual and the worldly.
García Rodero set out on this quest back in 1973, when Fundación Juan March awarded her an artistic creation grant that enabled her to buy her first camera, a 35 mm Asahi Pentax, and to spend one year visiting villages all over Spain to document and preserve a memory of their festivals, ceremonies and traditions and the way of life of their people. As she explained in the statement supporting her grant application, “my aim is to carry out an anthological survey of the customs of Spain, both in their openness and progress as well as their concealment and tradition, which have shaped its distinct character. To this end I will use the most current and representative medium of my time: photographic expression.”
This was the start of what would be, and remains, the most important project in her life’s work, España Oculta [Hidden Spain], the series of photographs compiled in the book of the same name published in 1989 as the catalogue for the exhibition held at the former Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid. Capturing the look and spirit of a very special moment in Spain, this widely lauded and sought-after book has inspired countless photographers, artists and lovers of the medium, and has gone on to become a landmark in the history of Spanish photography.
The book was finally reprinted in 2024, fifty years after that pivotal grant which, in García Rodero’s own words, “changed my life” and allowed her to “spend fifty years making a dream come true.” At the same time, several institutions celebrate her work by organizing Cristina García Rodero. España Oculta [Cristina García Rodero. Hidden Spain], showing the series of 159 images taken at the time with which the artist “tried to photograph the mysterious, true and magical soul of popular Spain in all its passion, love, humour, tenderness, rage, pain, in all its truth; and the fullest and most intense moments in the lives of these characters, as simple as they are irresistible, with all their inner strength, as a personal challenge that gave me strength and understanding and in which I invested all my heart.”
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