Cristina García Rodero. España oculta
García Rodero (Puertollano, 1949), winner of the 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 point of reference in contemporary photography. Since his beginnings, he has travelled thousands of kilometres in a constant search for images and characters.
That beginning dates back to 1973, when the Juan March Foundation awarded him a grant for artistic creation with which he bought his first equipment and travelled around the villages of Spain for a year in order to document and preserve their festivals, ceremonies, rites, traditions and ways of life: ‘I tried to photograph the mysterious, true and magical soul of popular Spain, with its passion, love, humour, tenderness, anger, pain, with its truth; and the most intense and full moments in the lives of the characters, as simple as they are 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 time in the country and which became a fundamental milestone in the history of photography in Spain.
En 2023 se estrenó el documental Cristina García Rodero. La mirada oculta, dirigido por Carlota Nelson y producido por Wanda Films, en el que la fotógrafa recorre lugares y fiestas, al tiempo que repasa su propia vida y experiencias.
En 2024, cincuenta años después de que recibiera la beca que, en palabras de la fotógrafa, «le cambió la vida» y le ha permitido «llevar cincuenta años haciendo realidad un sueño», varias instituciones celebran su trabajo organizando la exposición Cristina García Rodero. España oculta, que, a partir de mayo de 2024, viajará a varias sedes españolas (Círculo de Bellas Artes en Madrid, Centro Cultural La Malagueta de la Diputación de Málaga, Museo de Arte Abstracto Español de Cuenca y Museu Fundación Juan March de Palma, IVAM Centre Julio González) y que mostrará la serie completa de 152 fotografías realizadas antes de 1989.