Festival of a thousand faces

Madrid will be filled with faces new and old over the coming weeks. PHotoEspaña 2011 is kicking off, with the portrait the focus of this year's festival. At the 1.000 caras / 0 caras / 1 rostro (or, 1000 Faces / 0 Faces / 1 Face) exhibition in Madrid's Alcalá 31 space, the thousand faces of US artist Cindy Sherman, 57, are on display alongside the multiple and indifferent faces of Germany's Thomas Ruff, 53, and the curious, autobiographical images of unknown, 19th-century-born Mexican Frank Moreno Collado. The show, which forms part of the official section, titled Interfaces. Retrato y comunicación (or, Interfaces. Portrait and communication), features 103 images that reflect on the intricate paths of identity, representation and communication in today's society.

Over the decades Sherman has developed the seemingly impossible project of transforming herself into other people, imitating their identities as subjects in her photographs. She doesn't imitate real people, or characters from cinema or the media, but stereotypes and prevailing norms, which is why her images, at the same time real and fictional, show a referentiality as deceitful as it is authentic.

Ruff's series Portraits, meanwhile, depersonalizes his subjects, using tools that equalize them in a repetitive way: absence of expression, fixed framing, plain lighting, neutral dress and background. While in Sherman's work there is often just a single person, herself, who acts out the rest, Ruff's work features real people who appear as a single repetition to infinity, denying the portrait the possibility of showing individual interiority.

Next to the work of these globally renowned artists sit the photos of the unknown Montero, who was a Catholic seminarian, Methodist missionary, opera singer, journalist and popularizer of spiritualism who between 1855 and 1925 photographed himself in theatrical poses with the accoutrements of his jobs. A surprising 'Sherman' of himself.

The exhibition is one of 70 being held at various spaces around Madrid for the festival's 14th edition, the first directed by Cuban art critic and curator Gerardo Mosquera. One of the major changes he has introduced is to tackle photography "less in itself and more as the basis of the contemporary image," doing so via an open and occasionally provocative program in which such contrasting elements as the paparazzi esthetic, studio photography of the 19th to mid-20th centuries, amateur photography, social documentary photography, webcam use and emerging talents from China and Eastern Europe all rub up alongside each other.

PHotoEspaña 2011. Until July 24 at various venues around Madrid. Lisbon, Cuenca and Alcalá de Henares will also host events. www.phedigital.com