Cristina De Middel

Cristina de Middel is a Spanish photographer whose work investigates photography’s ambiguous relationship to truth. Blending documentary and conceptual photographic practices, she plays with reconstructions and archetypes that blur the border between reality and fiction. After a 10-year career as a photojournalist and humanitarian photographer, De Middel stepped outside of the photojournalistic gaze. She then produced the critically acclaimed series The Afronauts in 2012, which explored the history of a failed space program in Zambia in the 1960s through staged reenactments of obscure narratives. Since 2012 De Middel has been continuously producing new bodies of work that question how photography can contribute to our full understanding of our multi-layered and complex world. Mixing fiction with straight documentary practices, and inserting her narrative in the traditional tools of mass communication, her work brings more questions than answers in an attempt to build up a critical sense in the audience. With more than 13 books published, Cristina De Middel has exhibited extensively internationally and has received numerous recognitions for her work, including being a finalist at the Deutsche Börse Prize, the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York, the Spanish National Award in Photography in 2017 and more recently the Leica Oskar Barnak award. Cristina de Middel is a Magnum Associate and lives and works between Mexico and Brazil.