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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
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
International Museum Day 2026 with Radio 3
22 MAY 2026
On Friday, 22 May 2026 the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day by way of a vibrant music programme conducted by Radio 3.
From 9am to 11pm, the Museo’s Nouvel Courtyard will host the live broadcast of Radio 3’s day-long programme —also available on a video streaming on the Radio3 website and app, on RTVEPlay and on the Museo’s social media accounts. The programme comprises more than twenty live acts, including artists such as Carlangas, Shego, Soleá Morente, Kokoshca, La Tania, La Pegatina, Pipiolas, Ángel Stanich, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro and Zahara, and many others.
With this programme the Museo Reina Sofía concludes its celebration of International Museum Day, which takes place on Monday, 18 May. Both on 18 May, from 10am to 9pm, and 22 May admission to the Museo will be free of charge.
Gerardo Mosquera: Island Thinker, Global Curator
19 MAY 2026
This encounter pays homage to Gerardo Mosquera (Havana, 1945), a pre-eminent curator, an essayist who has been part of key debates on decolonisation and the drifts of globalisation, a communicator and, primarily, an art critic who has managed to radically situate discourses and practices, while still taking on risks and perpetually upholding committed ethical positions.
Mosquera is one of the foremost curators internationally and was involved with the Havana Biennial from its foundation in 1984 to 1989, as well as curating pivotal shows in museums and art centres around the globe. Notable among his curatorial work is as adjunct curator at the New Museum in New York (1995–2009), the Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the exhibition It’s Not Just What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000).
This round-table discussion, which features the participation of Gerardo Mosquerahimself and an ensemble of art critics, thinkers and artists, for instance Fernando Castro Flórez, Diana Cuéllar, Lillebit Fadraga and René Francisco Rodríguez, will approach the multifaceted and extremely fertile work of Mosquera as a renowned master curator.
Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, in Conversation with Museo Reina Sofía Director Manuel Segade
18 MAY 2026
Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofía directors, Miguel Falomir and Manuel Segade, respectively,engage in conversation on Monday, 18 May in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Auditorium 400, in conjunction with International Museum Day 2026, the theme of which is “Museums Uniting a Dividing World”. The discussion, moderated by journalist and poet Antonio Lucas, will see the two heads of these major cultural institutions share their reflections on the role they play in today’s society.
In addition to addressing the management of art, the conversation seeks to explore in greater depth museums’ potential as meeting points to face today’s social tensions, thereby fulfilling the international mandate of this year’s edition.
The activity will be live-streamed and is available at this link.