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Tuesday, 3 December 2019 – From 6:15pm to 9pm
Table 1. Counter-Narratives
Overture: For a Political Reading of Atget as a founding Figure of Modernity in Photography
This first round-table discussion puts forward an interpretation of photographer Eugène Atget based on the study of the ideological affiliations in his work, both implicit and explicit. This side is often overlooked in accounts of modernity in photography, which focus on Surrealism and the “new vision” as the overriding paradigms in the interpretation of the avant-garde in the 1920s, with Atget seen as its great precursor. Precisely as Molly Nesbit expounds in her seminal work on the photographer, part of the archival logic of his work is determined, ideologically, by his link to the worker movement. Thus, his album of Paris interiors offers a comparative analysis of society and class divisions at the turn of the century. Such a historical-social observation, referring to the breadth of Atget’s work from the start of the 1890s, anticipates the materialist focal points and photography projects that would not emerge until the 1920s, such as the Weimar social landscape archive embarked upon by August Sander, or the documentary movement of workers’ photo-correspondents.
Molly Nesbit. Exhibition Value
Steve Edwards. La Populaire: Atget (with Zille)Conducted by: Jorge Ribalta
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Wednesday, 4 December 2019 – From 11am to 2pm
Table 2. Uses of Photography
Photographic Archives and Political Violence. Appropriations and Resignifications
Photography is at once emancipatory and disciplinary. Halfway through the 19th century it surfaced with democratic promise, simultaneously contributing, since its inception, to apparatuses of social control and the auto-reproductive logic of state power. Photographic archives were part of the disciplinary apparatus, at least since the industrialisation of photographic technology in the final decades of the 19th century. The police archive of Alphonse Bertillon, implemented in the 1880s, is a paradigmatic example. Setting out from that genealogy whilst also questioning it, this table introduces different experiences of the resignification of archive photographs linked to dictatorships and wars. Such resignfications, including that distinctive form of archive, the family album, are proof of the traumatic experiences that offer models of resistance to archives’ repressive impulse, demonstrating that the social meaning of photographs and archives is not determined or limited by such disciplinary logic. Rather, it can subvert insofar as such meaning is produced with the uses and the forms of dissemination of photographs.
Jordana Blejmar. The Surviving Image: Photography and Disappearance in Argentina
Susana de Sousa Dias. Imagens fortes, memórias fracas: o outro lado de uma imagem
Lee Douglas. The Forensic Archive: Photography, Evidence and Knowledge in Twenty-First-Century SpainConducted by: Jorge Moreno Andrés
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Wednesday, 4 December 2019 – From 6pm to 9pm
Table 3. Collective Photographic Practices
Power, Anti-Imperialism and Representation
Thinking about the relationship between photography and politics entails stopping at the intersections between representation and circulation to analyse their place in social struggles and transformations. Photography, analysed not solely from the possible uses of the image, but more specifically from its consideration as a social practice able to articulate collective organisation and build networks of resistance and solidarity, opens up a new space to question historical anti-imperialist processes in the 20th century. Therefore, on one side, there is a need to address the right to representation and the dissemination of images, traditionally linked to state and institutional powers. On the other, to address how the photographic practice carried out and circulated outside these colonial and restrictive logics inherently possesses a dimension of politics and resistance. This table situates photography at the centre of struggles of representation and political engagement, whilst understanding its dissemination as a crucial moment, in which far-flung struggles connect through images, but with a possible subversion of their meaning.
Rocío Trigoso. Why Are You Looking at Me? A Vision of Peru from the Experience of TAFOS
Ileana Selejan. The Insurrect Archive
Darren Newbury. From ‘Sweetness and Light’ to ‘Race and Revolution’ in US Photographic Diplomacy: Picturing the Civil Rights Movement for AfricaConducted by: Inés Plasencia
Towards a Political History of Photography
Social Movements and Photographic Practices
Held on 03 Dec 2019
The Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre inaugurates a study area on photography, coordinated by Jorge Ribalta, that aims to encourage photographic studies by following a social and cultural focus. This programme, developed through a broad array of activities — seminars, lectures, guided tours, encounters— also seeks to put in place a network between different focal points of research, with national and international scope, to work towards shaping a discursive public sphere on photography and its theories, practices and history.
The programme begins its journey from the context of Western modern art, characterised by the distinctiveness and regard for the specific nature of each artform. At the end of the 19th century, however, photography burst away into a hybrid form owing to the dozens of uses and social practices it triggered. Charles Baudelaire’s famous condemnation of photography in The Salon of 1859, ruling that its role must be as the “humble servant” to science and the arts, would form a long-lasting categorisation. The field of photography has thereafter been constituting different aesthetic, communicative and epistemic impulses and demands — as a hybrid, multifarious and lesser art, photography opened up a disruptive space, a space of otherness, within art’s modernity. A new history of photography should begin precisely from such alterity.
The international seminar Towards a Political History of Photography, which gets this new area off the ground, is organised into three round-tables of debate, each one pivoting around a case study, with a view to bringing together a range of research focal points and methods. The first table, Counter-Narratives, sets forth a re-examination of the figure of French photographer Eugène Atget based on an analysis of the ideological affiliations in his work, both implicit and explicit. The second, Uses of Photography, presents different experiences of resignifying archive photographs linked to dictatorships and wars. The third table, Collective Photographic Practices, places photography at the centre of the struggles for representation and political engagement, underscoring how the circulation of images enables faraway struggles to connect.
With the support of
The University of Liverpool
Force line
Avant-garde movements
Academic committee
Jordana Blejmar, Jorge Moreno Andrés, Inés Plasencia and Jorge Ribalta
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Education programme developed with the sponsorship of
Participants
Jordana Blejmar is a lecturer in Visual Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Liverpool (UK). She is the author of Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (2016) and has co-edited a number of books, including Instantáneas de la memoria. Fotografía y dictadura en Argentina y América Latina (with Natalia Fortuny and Luís García, 2013).
Lee Douglas is a visual anthropologist, documentary film-maker, cultural manager and lecturer at Madrid’s New York University and at UCEAP. She is director of the cultural programme at the International Institute and is a producer on the digital re-publishing of the photobook Chile from Within with photographer Susan Meiselas.
Steve Edwards is a professor of History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck College, University of London (UK). He is the author of The Making of English Photography (2006) and editor of the book series Historical Materialism.
Jorge Moreno Andrés is a social anthropologist and film-maker. He is author of the book El duelo revelado. La vida social de las fotografías familiares de las víctimas del franquismo (2019).
Molly Nesbit es profesora de arte en el Vassar College (EE. UU.). Autora de Atget’s Seven Albums (1994) y Their Common Sense (2000). En 2013 publicó The Pragmatism in the History of Art, el primer volumen de una serie que recopila sus ensayos y conferencias. El segundo volumen, Midnight: The Tempest Essays, apareció en 2017.
Darren Newbury es profesor de historia de la fotografía en la Universidad de Brighton (Reino Unido). Autor de Defiant Images. Photography and Apartheid South Africa (2009) y People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited (2013). Coeditor de The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies (2015) y del número especial de Visual Studies, “Photography and African Futures” (2018).
Inés Plasencia is a researcher, independent cultural manager and teacher. She is a lecturer in the Department of History and Art Theory at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and a professor at Madrid’s Duke University. She has worked with cultural institutions that include the Museo Reina Sofía, Institut Valencià d'Art Moderne (IVAM) and Tabakalera-Donostia Centre for Contemporary Culture, among others.
Jorge Ribalta is an artist and independent curator. His projects as a curator most notably include the exhibitions A Hard, Merciless Light. The Worker Photography Movement, 1926–1939 and Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism, both in the Museo Reina Sofía (2011 in 2015, respectively).
Ileana Selejan is an art historian, researcher and a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. She is currently working on the project ‘Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination’, funded by the European Research Council.
Susana de Sousa Dias is a film-maker and lecturer at the University of Lisbon. She was previously director of Doclisboa and is the author of works such as 48 (2009) and Luz Obscura (2016).
Rocío Trigoso is a researcher and visual anthropologist. She lectures at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Lima, and is co-editor of La Calle es el Cielo. La Lima de Daniel Pajuelo (2014).
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.