EL PAÍS

The photographic universe of Valérie Belin: beauty between reality and fiction

Fotografía de Valérie Belin, Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Valérie Belin, 62, maintains that, “throughout history, beauty has functioned as a Holy Grail.” That is, as an ideal that’s eternally pursued. It fascinates because it’s an enigma that no one has been able to fully decipher.

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An open door into the rooms of Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and other residents of the legendary Chelsea Hotel

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:45:40 +0000

Albert Scopin arrived in New York the day after man landed on the moon, in the summer of 1969. He came from southern Germany. Trained as a photographer in Munich, he still used his birth name, Schöpflin. He was 25 years old and had $270 in his pocket. Enough to settle into 222 West 23rd Street, in a sort of darkroom with a tap: one of the lowest-tier rooms in the legendary Chelsea Hotel.

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Writing, watching, photographing: the heart of the matter according to Larry Sultan

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:37:34 +0000

The book Water Over Thunder brings together for the first time the writings of American photographer Larry Sultan (New York, 1946–California, 2009), a pivotal figure in photography of the second half of the 20th century. Far from being a mere complement to his visual work, these texts reveal that writing was an integral part of his artistic practice. His correspondence with curators, his continuous notes in notebooks, transcripts of his classes, drafts of short stories, as well as the candid entries in his diaries, where dreams find a privileged place, alongside more polished essays, allow the reader to follow the artist’s thoughts as he reflects on the act of seeing, family memory, and the limits of photography.

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Helen Levitt, the photographer who captured the theater of the everyday

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 04:00:00 +0000

In the monograph titled Crosstown (2001), Francine Prose writes that looking at a photograph by Helen Levitt (1913-2009) “is like taking off your sunglasses, or cleaning your spectacles, or just blinking.” The images, indeed, seem to be captured in the blink of an eye; in an instant destined to disappear in a few seconds, making us aware of how quickly everything changes. Rarely simple and natural, they endure through their serene and unadorned honesty, poised between documentary and visual poetry.

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Emilio Morenatti, an unwavering witness

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 13:00:38 +0000

At its annual event in Perpignan, France, the ‘Visa pour l’Image’ festival pays tribute to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Spanish photojournalist with an exhibition that traces his career, marked by passion, risk and empathy

Nikita Teryoshin, the photographer of the shameful business of war

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 05:30:00 +0000

At the end of summer in 2016, as has been customary since 1993, the International Defense Industry Exhibition (MSPO), took place on the outskirts of Kielce, Poland. This is the largest arms fair in Central Europe. Over 600 companies from 30 countries displayed their products. Nearly 22,000 people gathered among tanks, machine guns, bazookas and the latest developments in the war industry, while they snacked on canapés, accompanied by glasses of wine or champagne.

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Garry Winogrand: Visionary perceptions of everyday life

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 03:04:00 +0000

In 1967, an important exhibition opened at the MoMA: New Documents, a modest show, organized by John Szarkowski, destined to mark a major turn in the history of photography. On the first floor of the museum, Garry Winogrand (1928-1984), together with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, offered an original approach to perceiving and reflecting the world — a seemingly carefree and random perspective, which consolidated a shift in our understanding of the photograph as document. Now, the camera not only served as a tool to describe the environment, but as a reflection on the personal interactions a photographer has with their surroundings. In one of the rooms, a carousel projected 80 circulating slides of Winogrand’s works. A few days later, the projector broke and several of the slides were destroyed. This was the first and last time that the photographer would show his images in color.

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Jon Cazenave: When nature creates its own images

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 17:27:25 +0000

Jon Cazenave, born in 1978 in the Basque city of San Sebastián in northern Spain, says that the first impression he felt upon arriving at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station was one of anguish: he was overwhelmed by the blocks of ice and snow that make up the wild lands of Lapland. There, standing under Saana, one of the highest peaks in Finland, in a territory that serves as a border for three nations, he spent 16 days in almost complete solitude. It was the time of the year when winter was coming to an end and spring brought with it the thaw and endless hours of light. Invited to participate in Ars Bioarctica, an artistic and scientific research program, the photographer set out to develop new ways of representing the landscape with a clear purpose in mind: not to impose his own gaze but to allow nature to express itself.

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From Holland to Bulgaria, images of communism’s extremes

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 16:23:22 +0000

Born in communist Bulgaria, in 2001 Hristina Tasheva arrived as an undocumented immigrant in the Netherlands. She left her country with the idea that she’d earn a little money and return to start a new life in her homeland. One day, a Dutch citizen asked her: “Are you a communist?” The young woman didn’t know what to think of the question. Was it a reproach or approval? Today, the author has her Dutch nationality, but from that misunderstanding, a publication was born: Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery, a timely and compelling visual inquiry into the meaning of ideological utopias and their drift; concepts as necessary for rebellion against the present as they are constant in their failures of development.

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Photographer Carolyn Drake undresses masculinity

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 21:46:46 +0000

A disturbing and suffocating portrait welcomes visitors to Men Untitled, one of the exhibits at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris. In it, a figure covered from head to toe in a blue cloth poses in a seated position, leaving only his hands uncovered. It is Los Angeles-born photographer Carolyn Drake’s interpretation of a ghost mother, the term used to refer to the practice of keeping children still and under control at the dawn of photography when long exposures were required for a portrait; it consisted of mothers holding their offspring in their laps, covered like specters or human furniture draped in dark fabrics. Using a man as a model, Drake, 51, evokes that unfortunate chapter in the history of the medium. The piece serves as an introduction to a photographic journey that reverses gender roles and uses the male nude to redefine the contemporary gaze and question the traditional forms of representing the female body.

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Deborah Turbeville, distant and present in time

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 16:05:32 +0000

The timeless work of the American photographer is one of the most striking views into the second half of the 20th century. Through her strong sense of creative freedom she not only revolutionized fashion photography, but also investigated the nature of the medium

Benjamin: Beautiful, rebellious and radical

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:23:06 +0000

Cabbagetown is an unusual name for a neighborhood. Situated southeast of Atlanta, it’s one of the oldest parts of the city, settled by dirt-poor job-seekers from Appalachia who built the old, narrow wooden houses that are now being swallowed up by rapid gentrification. Robert Dickerson (1960-1999) lived in one of those Cabbagetown houses. Better known as Benjamin, the rebellious poet and singer-songwriter fronted the band Smoke, which is how photographer Michael Ackerman met him. After a show, Ackerman was invited to the musician’s house for an all-night party and fell asleep in one of the rooms. “A few hours later I woke up, looked in his room and saw him asleep on the floor in front of his bed. Now, 27 years later, I try to remember how I felt seeing him laying there so fragile. I took a picture, picked him up in my arms and carried him to his bed. Then I went out into the daylight to discover Cabbagetown.”

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A Spaniard in New York: David Jiménez’s photographs evoke Bob Colacello’s city

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 22:44:59 +0000

When the first version of artist and writer Joe Brainard’s I Remember hit New York bookstores in 1970, it quickly sold out. The singular publication was not exactly a memoir or a book of aphorisms but rather a series of disordered memories, of lost thoughts charged with great poetic magnetism, each of which began with “I remember.” Paul Auster described it as a masterpiece: “With simple, forceful sentences, it maps the human soul and permanently alters the way we look at the world.” Over the years, that repetitive formula has inspired different publications (Georges Perec’s I Remember and Marcello Mastroianni’s I Remember are among the most outstanding ones). The most recent addition is New York Memories (Ivorypress), a collaboration between the writer Bob Colacello, and Spanish photographer David Jiménez.

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An autobiography told in images

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 04:00:00 +0000

Walter Benjamin wrote that the talent of the narrator is to be able to “narrate his life and his dignity; the entirety of his life.” He said this as someone who was observing the decline of narration, in a time that already seemed prone to immediacy and abbreviation.

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Dreams of fortune: Photographing Silicon Valley

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 13:58:33 +0000

In recent years, another gold rush has swarmed San Francisco. Fueled by stories of making massive fortunes in the tech sector — the third most lucrative industry for the rich, according to Forbes — young entrepreneurs have flocked to this promised land with dreams of launching a start-up and becoming billionaires.

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The other side of paradise: The abuses of tourism

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 16:00:49 +0000

That the life and enjoyment of some is built upon the loss of others is something that researcher and visual artist Marina Planas seems to be very clear about. Over the last few years, she has been giving shape to a project that delves into the use and abuse of those places that have become a tourist destination for millions of people, with a particular focus on her own land, the Spanish island of Mallorca. Titled War Approaches to Tourism: All Inclusive, her project was selected by the Institute of Balearic Studies to be exhibited as part of the photography festival Cortona On The Move, which will celebrate its 13th edition in the Italian town of Cortona until October 1.

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Jan Groover, the photographer who discovered the metaphysics of kitchen utensils

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 15:06:22 +0000

It is said that the January 1979 cover of Artforum magazine was a sign that the photographic medium had definitively conquered the art world. It showed one of the characteristic still lifes of Jan Groover (Plainfield, New Jersey, 1943 – Montpon-Ménestérol, France, 2012). That was the first time that a photograph had served as the main attraction in a specialized art magazine. The cover image formed part of the American artist’s best-known series, Kitchen Still Lifes. “Its voluptuous colors were as impressive as its prices,” critic Andy Grunberg observed in The New York Times.

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A history of photography through love and desire

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 11:31:52 +0000

Simon Baker, the director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, tells of a time that he was looking through a Noyuyoshi Araki catalog with the photographer, when he came across an image of his wife. At that point, the artist exclaimed something to the effect of: “In all the time I spent with her, I thought I was photographing love, which was the subject of my work, but now when I look at these photographs of Yoko, I think that love is missing, that somehow I didn’t know how to capture it.” That demystifying statement by the creator of Sentimental Journey, a visual diary that traces the 19 years in which he obsessively photographed his beloved and for which he has been recognized as one of the earliest and most influential works of autobiographical photography, serves as the introduction to the Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy exhibition catalog. The exhibit is as romantic as it is raw; it invites the viewer to evaluate the potential of photography—which is inexorably associated with the real—for showing love, which is as invisible and elusive as it is complex and subjective in its definition.

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From paper to pixels: new forms of collage

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 15:04:29 +0000

Nothing is ever entirely new and yet, in the art of collage, everything is renewed. The subversion implicit in this artistic technique and its various actions — cutting, fragmenting, tearing, camouflaging, stealing, faking — disrupts all expectations while suggesting affinities and resonances that harmonize into one work of art. As unrestrained as it is adaptable, this form of visual expression, which secured its status as art in the early years of the 20th century, remains capable of capturing the spirit of the time by incorporating the elements that define an era. But what does it mean to speak of collage today, in the digital age, when the gesture that gave meaning to the practice — cut and paste — has been replaced by its computational alternative, copy and paste? What are the basic elements that qualify something as collage?

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‘The Kabuler’: Magnum photographers Cristina de Middel and Lorenzo Meloni demystify Afghanistan

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 17:21:47 +0000

Over the past two decades, Afghanistan has been one of the regions of the world that the media has documented the most. Even so, when it comes to getting a general idea of the situation in this war-ravaged country, we face many myths that underlie and complicate our interpretation. Interest in the country has been tailed off after the withdrawal of international troops from Afghan territory in 2021. That led Cristina de Middel and Lorenzo Meloni to revisit the narratives surrounding one of the countries that has been a main player on the world stage since the turn of the 21st century.

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The lost New York City publication that reappeared in a closet

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Fri, 26 May 2023 14:31:12 +0000

In mid-1968, a suggestive and daring publication began to circulate among the New York Bohemia. It focused solely on photography, containing no text. It circulated mainly through word-of-mouth and in places such as the emblematic nightclub, Max’s Kansas City, which was frequented by the hedonists of lower Manhattan. When opened up, the tattered, folded tabloid reached dimensions of 58 by 86 centimeters, allowing readers to hang its pages on the wall, as if they were works of art.

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From sculpture to installation: The new dimensions of the photobook

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 15:57:10 +0000

What would happen if a group of humans, fleeing from the climate catastrophe, moved to another planet and found a majestic, virgin and pristine landscape? What would they do? How would they colonize that habitat? Would they have learned from their mistakes, or would their predatory instincts surface again? These were the questions that British photographer Gareth Phillips pondered while visiting the remote South Island of New Zealand. There, experimenting with a macro lens under the exuberance of one of the few remaining wild territories, the author created Caligo, a fictitious alien Eden that took the form of a book-sculpture.

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The power of advertising images in big cities

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 09:35:58 +0000

The Moscow-born photographer Anastasia Samoylova is said to have the spirit of a flâneur: she likes to wander aimlessly through a city, finding pleasure in scrutinizing her surroundings while remaining unnoticed. As a good observer, attentive to the transformation of urban territory, she provides a witness account of how globalization and capitalism have been altering the relationship of the subject with the city, surrendered to the logic of consumerism.

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Little Axel: The sad story of the boy who grew up with Leonard Cohen

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 23:40:13 +0000

For the past few years, Axel Joachim Jensen has lived in a small, wooden house with a porch, where he likes to go out for a smoke, and a window with a view of meadows and pine forests. The house is part of a psychiatric facility near Oslo (Norway), in a tranquil location where bird songs and chirps are the only sounds to be heard. Jensen lives there voluntarily.

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Two photographers capturing the hidden side of the human face

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Sun, 15 May 2022 13:48:58 +0000

Sergeant F de Bruin, Department of Prisons Employee, Orange Free State is one of Roger Ballen’s best-known portraits. The photograph comes from the Platteland (1986-93) collection, which Ballen, who lives in South Africa, undertook to shine a light on a section of the white, rural population living on the margins and cut off from the dubious privileges offered by Apartheid. The huge and disproportionate features of his face and his melancholy gaze do not seem to belong to his body, and neither do they seem to correspond to a cog in the machinery of white supremacy. However, Ballen insists that the twisted wire behind the sergeant’s head (which is an obsession of the photographer), at the height of his eyes and ears, is what most caught his attention. Ballen says he is not interested in subjects that merely attract attention visually, but more in those that serve as a trigger, prompting the beholder to dig into the deepest and darkest parts of their own psyche.

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The flowers that smell of sex and death

Gloria Crespo MacLennan — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 16:53:25 +0000

Nabuyoshi Araki once said “flowers smell of death,” but also of sex. As such, they permeate the imagination of the Japanese photographer like symbols of Eros and Thanatos. Death and desire always travel hand in hand for this controversial artist, who grew up in the shadow of the Jyokanji temple, where the victims of the 1913 great fire of Yoshiwara – old Tokyo’s red-light district – lie, in the cradle of Edo culture. As a child, Araki liked to observe the flowers that visitors left on the graves. “The flowers become enriched with life as they approach death,” he wrote in Kakyoku, a monograph dedicated to his floral work. “Their moment of splendor comes just before they perish. When one approaches them, one is enraptured with a sexual spirituality. I can hear a Rondeau.”

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