Cristina García Rodero. España oculta
García Rodero (Puertollano, 1949), National Photography Award in 1996, Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2005 and Gold Medal for Merit in Work in 2014, among many other distinctions, is an indisputable reference in contemporary photography. Since her beginnings, she has traveled thousands of kilometers in a constant search for images and characters.
That beginning dates back to 1973, when the Juan March Foundation awarded her a grant for artistic creation with which she bought her first equipment and traveled for a year through the villages of Spain in order to document and preserve their festivals, ceremonies, rituals, traditions and ways of life: “I tried to photograph the mysterious, true and magical soul of popular Spain, with its passion, love, humor, tenderness, anger, pain, with its truth; and the most intense and full moments in the lives of the characters, as simple as irresistible, with all their inner strength, in a personal challenge that gave me strength and understanding and in which I invested all my heart.” The result of this work was the series of photographs collected in España oculta (1989), a book that fixed the face and spirit of a very special moment in the nation and became a fundamental milestone in the history of Spanish photography.
In 2023 the documentary Cristina García Rodero. La mirada oculta, directed by Carlota Nelson and produced by Wanda Films, in which the photographer travels through places and parties, while reviewing her own life and experiences.
In 2024, fifty years after she received the grant that, in the photographer's words, “changed her life” and has allowed her to “spend fifty years making a dream come true,” several institutions are celebrating her work by organizing the exhibition Cristina García Rodero: España Oculta, which, starting in May 2024, will travel to several Spanish venues (Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, La Malagueta Cultural Center of the Diputación de Málaga, Museo de Arte Abstracto Español de Cuenca and Museu Fundación Juan March de Palma, IVAM Centre Julio González) and will show the complete series of 152 photographs taken before 1989.