PHotoEspaña Preview

This year's PHotoEspaña Photography and Visual Arts Festival is all about "Place" — a nebulous theme but an apt one, considering the many ways photographers are documenting our planet's fragile state and also the geographic breadth that the festival itself has been cultivating. Now in its 11th year, PHE08 runs through July 27. This week at a press preview, a cadre of other journalists and I have been bouncing around festival venues throughout central Madrid — other shows will be staged in Cuenca, Spain; and Lisbon and Algarve, Portugal. Altogether 69 exhibitions will feature work by more than 250 artists, and a highly diverse group at that.

So a broad theme such as "Place" is both unifying and diffusing. The main concern seems to be mankind's tenuous relationship with the Earth. This informs the concerned documentary work of the collection's grand master, W. Eugene Smith, whose shots of industrial waste and demolition blasts counterpoint his social essays on demonstrating workers and rural doctors. A retrospective of Smith's work provides a historic backdrop for the festival at its headquarters in Madrid's Teatro Fernán-Gómez Cengtro de arte.

Other shows incorporated the concept of place tangentially, by focusing on one locale that is imbued with human drama: The most powerful example is by Spanish and Magnum photographer Cristina Garcîa Rodero (whose "Las tres llamas" is above).

Rodero's work, made over ten years but rarely seen, fills a huge exhibition of more than 100 large prints at Alcalá 31, resulting from her 2005 Culture Award of the Region of Madrid. This project focuses on the worship of religious cult hero María Lionza in the mountains of Venezuela, depicting pilgrimages and bizarre rituals teeming with spiritual passion, made all the more vivid by the photographer's deft eye; most appear hauntingly timeless in black and white, but a roomful of backlit color transparencies are even more riveting.

Yet it's the contemporary social studies and landscapes in one group show that truly set the tone for the PHE08 festival. At the Museo Colecciones ICO you can see Committed Places, Topography and the Present, with works by 11 photographers from throughout the world. The linchpin of this show is Taryn Simon's An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, with large prints from last year's lauded book of the same name. Simon's documents of unseen realities — from undisturbed rain forests to forensic-study sites for decomposing corpses, from inbred tigers (left) to fireworks testing sites — draw much of their power from their descriptive captions, but they sparked the most attention at the show's opening.

What I call the Caption Syndrome — wherein a visual artist's work requires a verbal explanation to be appreciated — applies to much of the Committed Places exhibition. Still, this work incisively probes our world: Belgium's Geert Goiris and  Germany's Geate Gütschow both show the eerie emptiness of marginalized lands punctuated by human activity; Vietnam's An-My Lê studies American troops preparing for the Iraq War in the California desert; Italy's Walter Niedemayr documents topsoil erosion in industrial environs and ski slopes. Each project springs from a well focused artistic point of view.

Similarly, in a separate exhibit at Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, German photographer Florian Maier-Aichen elaborates on familiar themes — aerial shots, environmental havoc, the dramatic California coastline — and makes them his own with selectively colorized huge prints that make his settings apocalyptic and barely recognizable.

If the PHE08 collection shows anything, it's that "Place" is in the eyes of the beholder. This is borne out by other shows, such as Roni Horn's enigmatic exploration of Iceland, based more in fine art than photography. As Thomas Demand (whose re-creation of a 2000 Florida recount station is at right) said at a press event for his show at Fundación Telefónica: "I am not an expert in photography — I hoped nobody would find out! My work is about ideas."

A day and a half into the PHE08 press week, we've barely scratched the surface. Stay tuned for another report. — Jack Crager