Cristóbal Hara, Mabel Palacín. PHotoEspaña 2009

For years Cristóbal Hara has witnessed the everyday life of Spanish villages. His first photographs were made with a clear documentary objective, but since he began to work with colour photography, he has evolved in a direction in which his interest is no longer the subject but photographic language.

One hundred photographs are put together in this retrospective, and they reveal the author’s relationship with the theme of the everyday during his entire professional career. The show comprises images from well known series as Lances de aldea [Village Lances] (1992), Vanitas (1998) and Contranatura [Against Nature] (2006), as well as works recently produced, creating a visual summary of the Madrid photographer’s artistic trajectory.

Mabel Palacín considers images as an agent for building reality and the camera as a research tool that keeps a special relationship with the real.

The artist presents two works that deal with the image’s double nature and the reconsideration of photography in view of its new condition within the digital universe. The Hinterland video owes its title to the area right next to a city. With this term, she defines the space of mutual influence between photography and the moving image. The photographic work explores how images work using four filmed sequences that are combined three times thus becoming 12 possible stories. The exhibit is completed with the video La distancia correcta [The Correct Distance] (2002-2003).