Akerman, Chantal. Bruges (Belgium), 1950. She is considered one of the most important European experimental filmmakers. After shooting her first short film Saute ma ville (1968), in 1971, she made a conclusive journey to the United States where she was introduced to several experimental filmmakers and their work. This would greatly influence her first film Hotel Monterrey (1971). From 1974 to 1978 she made Je, tu, il, elle; Jean Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; News from Home (1977), and Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978). Four years of silence after the failure of several projects led to the most particular film she ever did: Toute une nuit (1982). Her work as a visual artist focuses on video and installation. She has also conducted several seminaries and lectures.

Allen, Terry. Wichita, Kansas (United States), 1943. An independent artist who, from 1966 on, has worked with a great variety of mediums, including musical performances and theatre, sculpture, painting, drawing and video, as well as installations, in which he incorporates all of these mediums. He has been awarded some of the most important prizes and grants for the arts in the United States, such as the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (in 1970, 1978 and 1985), the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, etc. He has had solo shows in galleries and private spaces throughout the United States, and among his museum exhibitions, most outstanding are those held at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the ICA of San Francisco and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

Almeida, Helena. Lisbon (Portugal), 1934. She lives and works in Lisbon, where she studied painting at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes. In her work she unites and juxtaposes photography, painting and performance. As the protagonist of her photographs, Almeida represents a constant fight between painting and color, between photography and black and white; between abstraction and figuration and between the levels of what is real and what is imaginary. Among her exhibitions, which go back to 1967, most outstanding was her presence at the Bienal de Venecia in 1982; Art Basel 84; Casa de America, Madrid, 1998; SITE Santa Fe, 1999; and Centro Galego de Arte Contemoránea, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, 2000. Her work is included in collections such as the Bibliothéque National de Paris; Culturgest, Lisbon; Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; Museu Fundaçao Serralves, Porto; MEIAC, Badajoz; MNCA Reina Sofía, Madrid.

Almodóvar, Pedro. Calzada de Calatrava, Ciudad Real (Spain), 1951. Considered one of the most revealing characters of the Spanish rebellion against the prevailing culture during the 80´s -“la movida madrileña”-, he moved to Madrid where he got his first serious work as an administrative employee at the National Spanish Telephone Company. After work he used to write scripts for comics while he collaborated with various underground magazines, he formed the music duo Almodóvar y Macnamara and acted with the band Los Goliardos. At the same time he started studying filmmaking on his own. After his first feature film Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), he shot Entre tinieblas (1983); ¿Qué hecho yo para merecer esto? (1984); Matador (1986) and La ley del deseo (1986). The tragicomedy film Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1987) and an Oscar nomination gave him international prestige that was confirmed by success of later films such as Átame! (1989); Tacones Lejanos (1991); Kika (1993); Carne Trémula (1997) and Todo sobre mi madre (1999), this one awarded with the Oscar for Best Film in a Foreign Language in 2000. He is currently preparing his next film Hable con ella.

Alvarez Bravo, Manuel. Mexico D.F. (Mexico), 1902. After studying literature and fine arts and working for the Mexican public administration in various jobs, Alvarez Bravo becomes interested in photography and begins to make photographs in 1923. In the beginning, he explores abstraction by way of ensembles of superimposed paper cuttings. Throughout his long career, he got to know and was influenced by different artists and movements, from German new objectivism to surrealism, from Atget to Breton and, of course, Diego de Rivera, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, some of whom were exhibition companions. He was a teacher at the Escuela Central de Artes Plasticas in Mexico and in Chicago and he had ample experience in film, both in short and full length films, working as cameraman for Eisenstein and Buñuel. Deeply rooted in Mexican culture and society, he concentrated his attention on human relationships, especially those of the working classes, creating eloquent images of the peculiarities of their lives, of their dreams and frequently, of their deaths. His images of the Mexican society of his time, the window displays, murals as well as the popular and social manifestations, have become an iconographic representation of an entire society and epoch. He has exhibited in myriad museums and galleries since 1928 to this day. In Spain, his work has recently been seen at the IVAM in Valencia and at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. At the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico, there is an exhibition space wherein his work is exhibited on a permanent basis.

Araki, Nobuyoshi. Tokyo (Japan), 1940. After studying photography and film at the university, he  works as photographer  for the Dentsu agency until 1972, at which time he begins to work as a free-lance photographer. His first works are published and exhibited with the title “Sentimental Voyage”, which incorporates the images of his wedding trip. In 1990, his wife dies and, in 1994, he refuses to exhibit at the Venice Biennial. This independent and excessive personality leads him to explore the world of sex, with images resembling pornography, fetishism and sadism. He has a profound knowledge of Japanese culture and his photographs have dealt with very different subjects, most outstanding of which is his series about Tokyo and its underground, clubs, prostitution, etc. He has exhibited his work all over the world and it is included in the most important collections, both public and private. Among the entities that have shown his work, most outstanding are the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum; International Center of Photography, New York; Museum für Kunst un Gewerbe, Hamburg; XXV Bienal de São Paulo, Brasil; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Centre National de la Photographie, Paris; Deichtorhalle, Hamburg, etc. In Spain, he has exhibited in the Casa Elizalde of Barcelona and the Sala Parpalló of Valencia.

Avedon, Richard. New York (United States), 1923. Considered one of the best auteurs in the history of photography, Avedon is widely known for his images of fashion, a genre he revolutionised with his photographs on the streets and in all sorts of other ambiences, as well as with his portraits of famous personages. However, Avedon’s work is much richer and, above all, more varied. As a philosophy student at Columbia University, he opts for photography, which he learns auto-didactically. The innovative and, at times, absolutely revolutionary aspect he imprints on every genre he touches, has earned him a professional status beyond all doubt. What is most outstanding in his portraits, first of famous personalities from the worlds of politics, culture and entertainment, and later of anonymous people from all walks of life, is a potent symbolism, both in the gestures and in the way the characters are revealed in each image; to such an extent that the objective of his portraiture is not the recognition of the person but rather the personality of the individual. In addition to his multiple commercial publications and exhibitions, Avedon’s work has been exhibited at the MOMA, the Metropolitan and the Whitney Museum, all of which are in New York, and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, in 1994.

Balcells, Eugènia. Barcelona (Spain), 1943. She studied Technical Architecture at the University of Barcelona. In 1968, she moved to New York, where she earned a Masters of Fine Art at the University of Iowa. Since then, she has been living and working between Barcelona and New York. She is one of the key artists of Spanish contemporary art, and work deals with human beings, consumer society and the effects of mass media on the culture of masses. In her works, different media and languages are mingled: audiovisual installations in which sound, light and movement coexist with memory, the history of the commonplace, the fusion of the mystery of the essential with the magic of creation. In recent years, she has exhibited in the Museo del Barrio, New York, the MNCRA Reina Soffía, Madrid, the Centro Cultural of Belém, Lisbon, and the MACBA and the Palau de la Virreina, in Barcelona, in addition to numerous group shows, video festivals, installations and performances throughout the world. Most noteworthy among her prolific work are From the Center (1987), Sincronías (1995), Veure la llum (1996), En el cor de las coses (1998), the films Boy Meet’s Girl (1978) and For/Against (1983), and the videos Indian Circle (1981) and Tomorrow’s Colors (1982). At present, she is preparing her first full length 35mm film.

Baldessari, John. National City, California (United States), 1931. He studies painting at San Diego State College. In 1953, he becomes the Director of the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, and between 1955 and 1968, he teaches art at various schools and universities in San Diego. His first exhibition dates from 1960, at the La Jolla Art Center, in California. Between 1962 and 1972, he returns to teaching, this time at the University of California and at Hunter College. It is from 1980 on that he focuses on photographic production, and his manipulations of photographic images and of film are categorised as criticism of the role of art and artists in society as well as of violence and its presence in the visual art of the century. He is considered one of the main conceptual artists from the United States. He has exhibited in myriad museums and events throughout the world, among which, particularly worth mentioning, are the V and VII Documentas in Kassel, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, in 1960 and, recently, at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Barcelona.

Balen, Céline van. Amsterdam (Netherland), 1965. She belongs to a new generation of Dutch photographers who admire classical painting and the modern photographic school of The Netherlands. Her work has focused on portraiture and almost always  depicts young women and girls. These close-ups always focus on a small feature in the face of the model. Her depictions of female immigrants from Eastern Europe in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and her images of muslim girls in The Netherlands are outstanding. She has exhibited in The Netherlands, Germany and the United States. Her work forms part of the most important collections of The Netherlands.     

Barclay, Per. Oslo (Norway) 1955. After finishing his art studies in Italy, Per Barclay has shown his work in collective and individual exhibitions since 1985.With his work he has travelled to Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy,France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Greece. Although he is not considered a photographer in the strict sense of the term, he has developed a whole new genre with the photographs of his installations and sculptures. He currently lives and works in Paris.

Barney, Tina. New York (U.S.A.), 1945. Born and raised in the bosom of an elite Long Island family, she has spent much of her artistic career portraying her intimate surroundings, family relations, friends and colleagues. Using a large format camera and brilliant colors, she produces luscious, larger than life images, branding her own form of contemporary realism, thus sharing a vision of an upper crust world that most people never even get a glimpse of. She studied at the Sun Valley Center for Arts and Humanities during the late 1970s. Her work forms part of numerous American photography collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House and the Chase Manhattan Bank, among many others. She is represented by the Janet Borden Gallery in New York and the spaces where she has had solo shows include the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester. In 1997, the German publisher Scalo published an exceptional monographic book, which takes a retrospective look at this very personal work, Tina Barney Photographs: Theater of Manners.

Barton, F.W. (Great Britain), second half of the XIX century. During his period as administrator of the British colony in the region of Papua New Guinea, he made a great quantity of images with a very anthropological interest in tattoos. But his work surpasses the limits of a scientific anthropological study to take on a composition more in accordance with the artistic traditions of the end of the XIX century, as well as a marked sexual interest in the young natives. The tattoos that Barton reflected were unusual and, customarily, their contemplation by foreigners was not  permitted, both facts which make evident his political importance as the administrator of the region.

Belin, Valérie. Boulogne-Billancourt (France), 1964. Vélerie Belin presents us with photographs in black and white where every detail, every shade of gray and every brutal contrast between shade and light reveal the very nature of the photographic image. The Mirror’s series bring out the complexity of the subjects composition and context. From a perfectly black background the transparencies and textures of shaped and designed glass are brought out. This series along with the "Automobile Wrecks" from 1998, can be considered as near to those diverse series of clothes, or suits, that use the same perspective artifice of overturning the frontal plan of the frame. Another common element to these photographs is the fact that they all are concerned with the representation of things that have been "lived in", be they clothes or automobile interiors, which give off a certain sense of death, or absence. These photographs perform a twofold function: that of representation, of the body in particular and in perspective; and that of evocation, or of memory. Some of her individual exhibitions include Showcase of the Museum of Decorative Arts, Paris; Musée de Picardie, Amiens; Gallery 21, Tokyo; Artothèque, Caen; Centre d’art contemporain de Vassivière en Limousin in 1999 and shows at the Galerie Xippas, Paris; Gallery Prinz, Kyoto in 1998. She has collectively shown her work in Un monde irréel, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; La Mariée/La novia, Yvonamor Palix, Mexico City; Le corps du visible, Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles; Mariage, une histoire cousue de fil blanc, Museum of Fashion and Costume, Palais Galliera, Paris, all in 1999.

Bertillon, Alphonse. (France) 1853-1914. In the year 1872 the first photographic service, based on the Bertillon method of criminal recognition, is created in Paris. This method is in essence a study and cataloguing of criminal types based on photographs taken of convicted criminals, and their anthropomorphic analysis. In 1882, Bertillon is nominated director of this service with his own photography studio. This was the origin of modern-day bureaus of identification employed by police. 

Billingham, Richard. Birmingham (England), 1970. He studies Fine Arts at the University of Sunderland. In 1995, he obtains the Felix H. Man Memorial Prize and, in 1997, the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize. In 2001, he participates in the Artists Work Programme at the IMMA, Dublin. His photographs, initially taken as sketches or studies for future paintings, present domestic scenes of his parents, brother or house pets, in a faithful reflection of a commonplace aesthetic. Between document and fiction, between heroic and tragicomic, he treats social and psychological stereotypes pertaining to the British working class. Among his exhibitions, most noteworthy are his participation, in 1997, in Sensation, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, together with other members of the contemporary generation of British artists. His work has also been on view at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; National Museum of Film and Photography, Bradford; Luhring Augustine, New York; Galerie Monica Reitz, Frankfurt am Main; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Museum of Contemporary Art, Szombathely, Hungary; De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Castello di Rivoli, Turin and in the 49 edition of the Venice Biennial, 2001.

Blanca, Paul. Willemstad, Curaçao (Holland), 1959. An autodidact, he has a professional relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. He lives and works, as a fashion photographer, in Amsterdam. His personal work has been exhibited regularly since the 1980s in European and American galleries and museums, and his photographs belong to both public and private collections.

Boltanski, Christian. Paris (France), 1944. An autodidactic artist, in the beginning his work consists of objects and, since the late 60s, also of photographs, his own and those of others, used for the reconstruction of personal and collective memory. What, during a first stage, started as a search for his own childhood, for his origins, over time has become a substantial document of the history of oblivion and loss, especially that of segments of populations massacred in wars or by other circumstances. His photographs, currently mostly originating from archives, are exhibited in a scenic manner wherein they constitute authentic installations amidst lights and shadows. Boltanski has become a part of a public and historical conscienceness. He has participated on a number of occasions, since 1972, in the Documenta in Kassel, and has shown his work at the Museum of Modern Art and in the Centre Georges Pompidou, both located in Paris, and in Spain, at the Centro Nacional Museo Reina Sofia, in Madrid and the Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, in Santiago.

Bony, Oscar. Posadas, Misiones (Argentina), 1941. A fundamental name within the realm of conceptual Latin American art, Bony started out combining several media: painting, drawing, installation and performance. After dealing with censorship and with a serious questioning of the ethics of the art system, Bony decided to retire from the scene for a period seven years (1969-75) during which he travelled to Europe, finally settling for Milan where he would live between 1977 and 1988, only to later go back to Buenos Aires wher he currently lives and works. Throughout his artistic project, time, death, violence, identity and borders have been the reference subjects of his work. From the early nineties onward, the camera and his photographic vision of painting –already present in a series like  Cielos-, will become preeminent in his artworks. He will turn to making series of photographic self-portraits in color and in a big format that, once they’ve been framed, will be subjected to the impact of gunshots. An exemplary artistic suicide that could be seen in shows like El Triunfo de la Muerte (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires) and Fuera de las formas del cine, Reconstrucción (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires), both in 1998.

Bradley, Slater. San Francisco, California (USA), 1975. The artist lives and works in New York. He studied at the University of California in Los Angeles. He is both photographer and video artist. He is also interested in cinematography and curatorial work. His work, both as a photographer and film maker, focuses on certain idea of solitude and isolation present in daily environments. He started exhibiting his work at the end of the 1990s and, in just a few years, he has had shows in American and European galleries such as Team Gallery, New York; Art & Public, Geneve and Yvon Lambert, Paris. He has also exhibited his work at international fairs such as Art Basel.

Buetti, Daniele. Fribourg (Switzerland), 1955. He lives and works both in Zürich and Berlin. His work focuses on the stereotypes of beauty defined by the fashion and advertising world. Upon the images he takes from specialized magazines, Buetti writes and marks faces and bodies with messages and brand names, creating tattoos, a corporal writing that satirizes the media and humanizes the women and men, the models of beauty, who are marked by his intervention. He criticizes and rejects the image cult and transforms those symbols of glamour and sophistication into human beings. He has exhibited, among other places, at the Galerie arsFutura, Zürich; Espai Lucas, Valencia; ACE Gallery, Los Angeles; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; MNCA Reina Sofía; Fotomuseum, Winterthur; National Institute for Photography, Rotterdam; Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, Amberes; Kunstmuseum, Biel / Akademie der Kunstmuseum Bern; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Migrosmuseum, Zürich; Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris; MNCA Reina Sofía, Madrid; Musée de l´Elsée, Lausanne; Kunsthaus, Bregenz; Museum für Gegen-wartskunst, Zürich; Villa Merkel, Esslingen.

Burden, Chris. Boston (United States), 1946. He studies art at the University of Irvine in California. He begins his artistic career as a sculptor, but the gigantic dimensions of his sculptures make them unviable, so he turns to body art, of which he becomes a maximum exponent. From 1971 on, he presents performances, events and videos that explore the extreme limits of physical and psychological resistance, from shooting himself with a gun and real fire, to inviting spectators to poke him with pins, or crucifying himself over an automobile. In 1977, he participates in the Kassel Documenta.

Cahun, Claude. [Lucy Renée Matilde Schwob] Nantes 1894-Saint Hélier, Jersey, English Channel Islands 1954. A photographer and writer, she began to create photographic self-portraits around 1912. In approximately 1917 she adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun. She moved to Paris in 1922 with her stepsister, lifelong partner and sometime collaborator Suzanne Malherbe (who signed Marcel Moore). There, Cahun briefly engaged in theatrical pursuits, while continuing to contribute to literary journals. In 1930 she produced Aveux non avenus (Avowals not admitted), a book of prose poetry and photomontages made in collaboration with Malherve. Cahun espoused leftist politics and played a role in the Surrealist movement, probably joining the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Revolutionnaires by the end of 1932. Along with André Breton and Georges Bataille she was a founding member of Contre-Attaque, a gropup established in 1935n in response to the threat of fascism. In her self-portraits Cahun frequently presented herself costumed, made up, or masked as various personae, including a life-size “doll” and a Turandot-like figure. There is no evidence that she ever exhibited any of these photographs so it is likely that they were made chiefly for her own personal use. It is only recently, through such publications as Edouard jaguer’s 1982 Les mystères de la chambre noire: Le Surréalism et la photographie and the 1985 exhibition L’amour fou: Photography and Surrealism at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.) that Cahun’s virtually unknown photographs were rediscovered.

Capa, Robert. Budapest (Hungary), 1913 - Indochina, 1954. Endre Friedman was exiled to Hungary due to his communist beliefs and moved to Berlin in 1931, where he studied journalism and sociology while working as assistant in a photography laboratory and afterwards at the agency Dephot. The Nazi presence forced his move to Paris, where he worked for the magazine Vu. In 1936, he took on his professional alias Robert Capa and, while covering the Spanish Civil War, he took the groundbreaking and daring shots that are renowned for revolutionizing photography, especially war photography. He went on to cover the Japanese invasion of China, World War II and the creation of the nation of Israel as well as the revolts in Mexico, Palestine and Cambodia, where he died victim of a landmine. Having been a photojournalist for magazines such as Life and Collier’s, he became a United States citizen in 1946, and the following year he founded the prestigious Magnum agency, alongside his colleagues Cartier-Bresson, Seymour and Rodger. Capa’s work is a basic reference of documentary reportage, with a strength that resides in its invocation of the absurdity of war while simultaneously maintaining the intensity of hope. After the World War, he turned to making portraits of his distinguished friends such as Picasso, Hemingway, John Huston and Ingrid Bergman.  Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been shown in numerous museums around the world, most noteworthy of which were the International Center of Photography, New York, the MNCA Reina Sofía, Madrid, and his work has been published by publishers such as Aperture and Phaidon.

Carrera, José Antonio. Madrid (Spain), 1957. He elaborates documentaries and reportage for the Spanish public television station, TVE. This professional experience has permitted him an acquaintance with very different cultures and peoples and, in them, by way of his photographs, he has sought the ever similar essence of human beings. In America, Asia and Africa, he has photographed the hospitality and compassion demonstrated by those who have nothing, the elegance of those who adorn their naked bodies or the dignity shown by some people living with violence and injustice. He has published his work in newspapers and magazines such as Panorama Travel of Milan or in shows like ARCO or the Frankfurt fair, but also in group shows (FNAC-Madrid, Museo del Agua of Lisbon or The Paul Kopeinkin Gallery in Los Angeles) and solo shows (Círculo de Bellas Artes, Casa de America, Museo de La Ciudad -as part of PhotoEspaña, Galería Berini, Barcelona and Galería La Kábala, Madrid). He was awarded the Foto Press 97 scholarship for “The Yanomami Relatives”. The private Cualladó collection, which was acquired by the IVAM funds three years ago, includes works by José Antonio Carrera.

Cartier-Bresson, Henri. Chanteloup, Seine et Marne (France), 1908. A photographer classic, Cartier-Bresson studied literature and painting in Cambridge and participated in the surrealist milieu of the era before turning to the photographic language. Beginning with a small Leica, he had his first solo show in 1932 at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. His forte was reportage and street photography, taking trips to Africa, Mexico and the United States. Always sharing experiences and apprenticeships with the giants of his time, he worked in filmmaking with Paul Strand, Jean Renoir and Jaques Becker, exhibited with Manual Alvarez Bravo and Walker Evans, and he joined the staff of several periodicals as a photojournalist. During the Spanish Civil War, he made a short film about the republican effort. Back in France, he was detained by the Nazis, although he managed to escape from the Wuttemberg prison and join the Resistance. After the liberation of Paris, he began to photograph the most outstanding artists, his peers. In 1946, he went to the US and showed up at an exhibition of his own work that the MoMA had designed believing him dead in the war. Again, he surrounded himself with artists and intellectuals such as William Faulkner, Alfred Stieglitz and Saul Steinberg. In 1947, he became co-founder of the Magnum Agency alongside Robert Capa, Seymour and Rodger and spent the next twenty years of his life traveling around the world to cover the most important current events with his ground-breaking pictures. Among the most important books about his work are Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer, 1979, published by the International Center for Photography and Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work, by Peter Galassi in 1987.

Chang, Patty. San Francisco (United States), 1972. Chang pursued her artistic career at the University of Callifornia and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. She has come to be known in the New York artistic scene through her performance work where she intertwines diverse resources from body-art with late nineties post-feminism. Her proposals delve around subjects like the body, identity, sex or sickness. Her works, both in video and in performance, have a remarkable visual impact underlined by a highly critical content.

Clark, Larry. Tulsa (USA), 1943. The artist lives and works in New York. He is both photographer and film maker. He became well-known in 1971 for his work Tulsa, in which through photographs and films made in 1963, 1968 and 1971 he explains the provincial life of his friends and of himself. Drugs, sex and violence are shown clearly. In his well-known series, Teenage Lust (1983), The Perfect Childhood (1993) and his controversial film Kids (1994-1995), his main interests are both adolescence and youth. He has exhibited his work at the Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kunstmuseum of Lucern, Switzerland, Sala Parpalló of Valencia, Spain, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, and in the Venice Biennale in the year 2001, among others.

Collishaw, Matt. Nottingham (United Kingdom), 1966. He belongs to a group of young British artists who earned international recognition during the decade of the 90s, after the exhibition “Sensation. Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” (Royal Academy of Art, London, 1997). Currently, his work is centred on digital imaging and the creation of alternative fantastic worlds. In 1993, he participated in the “Aperto” of the Venice Biennial and later in group shows at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, at the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris and at the Serpentine Gallery in London, among others.

Constantine, Elaine. Manchester (United Kingdom), 1965. After working as a freelance photographer, photography technician and instructor at the Salford College of Technology (a position she held for five years), she moved to London in 1992 to work as first assistant to photographer Nick Knight. At present, she is one of the most important and acknowledged fashion photographers in the United Kingdom. As a photographer specialized in fashion for teenagers, her dynamic style, full of energy, has substantially changed the world of fashion photography. Her photographic work has gone beyond the pages of the magazines to become part of the art scene. Her photographs have been included in several exhibits of British photography such as Look at me and Imperfect Beauty, shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). She collaborates regularly for Vogue Italy and The Face.

Contreras, Luis. Valencia (Spain), 1959. Like a contemporary landscape, Luis Contreras’ photography compiles visions and fragments of our most ordinary surroundings. In his work, he uses fragments of images taken from film, television and signs, with a method reminiscent of the channel flipping of a modern-day TV spectator. This utilisation of colour and of the agglomeration of messages, icons and visual cliches configure a very particular body of work in which texts in English and parallelisms between similar forms with quite different contents are frequent. The structure of his pieces remind us of video installations in which video screens are superimposed and all sorts of messages, texts, forms and colours are crisscrossed. He has shown his work in numerous galleries and participated in group shows at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, at the Santa Mónica centre in Barcelona, the Foundation Arte y Tecnología in Madrid, etc.

Cotthingam, Keith. Los Angeles, California (USA), 1965. His educational background of drawing and photography is continued with further studies of digital photography and interdisciplinary arts at the University of California in San Francisco. His artwork focuses on the relationship between fiction and truth. His series of work brought out here were made in the early 1990s, and can be described as a series of fictitious portraits of non-existing individuals or groups made of real fragments. He has exhibited his work in the Kunsthalle of Krems, Austria; Arken Museum, Denmark; Los Angeles County Museum, USA, Foundation Cartier, Paris, and other private galleries in Europe and the USA.

Craig-Martin, Jessica. United Kingdom. Educated at New York University, The New School and the International Center of Photography, both also in New York, Craig-Martin has focused her lens close up on the party hearty jet set. Whether at Cannes benefit luncheons or high society celebrations in the Hamptons, her photographs portray all the typical frills and thrills, fashionable dresses, pricey jewels, designer hairdos and poised attitudes of the prestigious actors of this privileged stage, always using cropped compositions to protect the identity of her subjects while also amplifying and caricaturizing the symptoms and symbols of their identity. She is represented by the Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at the Marureen Paley/Interim Art gallery in London, at Fiction Inc. in Tokyo and the Colette in Paris and the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. This year, 2002, the MNCA Reina Sofía in Madrid will be showing her work in an individual show.

Cruz Megías, Juan de la. Murcia (Spain), 1959. An autodidact, he started taking photographs at the age of eleven, when he was given his first camera. At fourteen, he took his first wedding pictures and at 19, he set up his first professional studio. Specializing in wedding photography, in which he reflects all the individual and collective ritual of this social event, showing the emotional and sexual intensity as well as the social and ritual characteristics of weddings in contemporary Spain. He has published the book Bodas 1979-1999, Barcelona, 1999. In 2000, he was the winner of the best portfolio in PhotoEspaña. This same set of works has been exhibited at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid, 2001; at Forum de l'Image 2001, Galerie Kandler, Tolouse, and at the galeria H2O, Barcelona.

Darzacq, Denis. France, 1961. At present the artist lives and works in Paris. In the year 2000 the Centre National de la Photographie asked him to photograph the youth of France. As a result, Darzacq has photographed youngsters and teenagers, as groups, as couples… in their usual environments. This extensive work has been awarded an Altadis Prize and as a result has been on display in both Paris and Madrid. He has also exhibited his work on galleries and museums in France, Japan and Spain.

Delvoye, Wim. Gante (Belgium), 1965. He lives and works in Gante and New York. His work is characterized by the diversity of media and materials utilized and by the systematic irony he employs to topple stereotypes of art and society, and by a great interest in the biological processes of the human body. Regarding his expository activity, most worthy of mention are his shows at the MUHKA, Amberes; the Kunsthalle of Nürnberg, in 1990, he participated in the Aperto of the Venice Biennial, in 1992 in the IX Documenta in Kassel, in the Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Helsinki, and MNCA Reina Sofía, Madrid, in the exhibition No es sólo lo que ves: pervirtiendo el minimalismo.

Desprez, Bertrand. France, 1963. The artist lives and works in Paris. He started working as a photographer in the United States in 1989. This project would be followed by a series of portraits of jazz musicians, of travel photographs and of the four seasons in Japan, as well as some commissioned work published in French publications such as Jazz Magazine, Libération, L’Express, Télérama and Géo. Between 1993 and 1996 he documented extensively certain aspects of adolescence with the collaboration of young students from Paris. Editions Actes Sud has published several monographs of his work. Furthermore, he has also been awarded several national and international prizes and has had shows in Arles, Paris, Tokyo, Kyoto, Florence and New York. Since 1999 is member of the Agence Vu, Paris.

Dijkstra, Rineke. Sittard (Netherland), 1959. The artist lives and works in Amsterdam. All her artwork, characterized by frontal portraits of individuals and groups, focuses on teenagers and youngsters depicted in different attitudes. Young women, Israeli soldiers, students, girls in gardens, boys and girls on the beach, near the sea… All these moments are out of all daily difficulty and worry; the artist looks for the intensity of their personality. It is worth mentioning her shows at MoMA, New York; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; and Venice Biennale, among others. She has had also displays in several galleries in both Europe and the USA.

Divola, John. Los Angeles (United States). Centred on photography as a method of analysis, Divola has a long trajectory with subjects such as frontiers, transgressions and crimes, works which he has exhibited in many different places around the world such as Australia, Holland and Japan, both in privately run spaces and public centres, among which are the PhotoBiennale of Enschede, the Siebu Gallery in Japan, The Center for Creative Photography in Arizona, the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico D.F. or the Whitney Museum of New York. He has been awarded several prizes and grants for his work, among which are the National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships of 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1991. At present, he is art professor at the University of California at Riverside.

Doherty, Willie. Derry (Northern Ireland), 1959. Doherty’s work, his photographs as well as his films and videos, have always been closely related to the social and political situation of violence and, on occasion, of outright war, that he has experienced ever since childhood in Northern Ireland. Terrorism and violence, and city streets where these things happen, constitute the axis of his photographs. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994. Among his most recent exhibitions, most worthy of mention are those celebrated in the ICA in London, the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, the MoMa of Oxford, the Kunsthalle of Berna, the Kunstverein in Munich and the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris; in Spain, his work has been seen in Barcelona, at the Palacio de la Virreina and in San Sebastián, at the Koldo Mitxelena exhibition space.

Doisneau, Robert. Gentilly, Val-de-Marne (France), 1912 - Paris, 1994. Robert Doisneau, one of the the most famous and prolific French reportage photographers, is known for his photographs that portray all sectors of French society, and which mix the most elite social classes with the eccentric characters in the streets and coffee shops of contemporary Paris. Influenced by the work of Kertesz, Atget and Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau presented, in more than 20 books, an attractive vision of human fatality and life in the form of a series of silent moments made eternal by photography. He himself wrote, “The marvels of daily life are exciting; no film director can recreate the unexpected things that can be found on the street”. He studied engraving at the Ecole Estienne in Chantilly, but found this training out-dated and useless. He learned photography in the advertising department of a pharmaceutical company. He began to photograph details of objects in 1930. He sold his first photographic story to the newspaper Excélsior, in 1932. He was the photographic assistant of the sculptor Andrei Vigneaux, and carried out his military service before accepting a post as commercial  photographer for the Renault factory in Billancourt in 1934. Fired in 1939, he set out to work independently. He worked for the Rapho agency for a few months until he was drafted by the army in 1939. He joined the Resistence as a soldier and photographer, and made use of his engraving skills to falsify passports and IDs. He photographed the Occupation and the Liberation of Paris. Immediately after the war, he went back to work on his own, collaborating with LIFE and other important international magazines. He joined the Alliance agency for a brief period and resumed a collaboration with Rapho, which lasted for almost fifty years. Not in keeping with his inclinations, he made fashion and high society photographs for Vogue between 1948 and 1951. In addition to his work as photojournalist, he made portraits of a large number of artists: Giacometti, Cocteau, Léger, Braque, Picasso, Jacques Tati. Doisneau won the Kodak prize in 1947 and the Niepce prize in 1956. His work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, including those held at the Bibliothéque Nationale of Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the George Eastman House in Rochester and the Witkin Gallery, both in New York, as well as the Fundació “la Caixa”of Barcelona.  

Duchamp, Marcel. Blainville, Normandy, 1887 - Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1968 (France). Marcel Duchamp’s work and attitude mark not only the passage between centuries, but also a way of understanding art and creation, which, between the pleasure of living and the exercise of intelligence, leads to a fracture in the concepts and procedures of artistic production. Influenced during his early years by Cezanne, the fauvists, the cubists and the futurists, his work will later derive toward less formal, more intellectual and mental suppositions, as he becomes interested in optics, mechanics, chess and yet also in pleasure and desire, as he questions the bourgeoisie status of the work of art in its entirety, through pieces like The large glass or his famous ready mades. After his participation in 1913 in the “Armory Show” in New York, he founds in that city a pre-dadá group together with Many Ray, Picabia and Alfred Stieglitz. In 1936, he participates in the “Surrealist Exhibit” of London and the “Fantastic Art, Dadaism, Surrealism” at the MOMA in New York. His interest in the double personalities of artists, the questioning of traditional artistic concepts, the influence of fate, seduction, sex and the voyeuristic tendency of the glance, as well as an iconoclastic and ironic genius, convert him into one of the essential creators of the XX century, whose shadow is cast over posterior movements for he is to become an obligatory reference for many turn-of-the-century conceptual artists.

Egoyan, Aton. Cairo (Egypt), Screenwriter, producer and director, Egoyan, now a Canadian citizen, began his career as a young filmmaker shooting short films. He is considered one of the most avant-garde directors of modern Canadian cinema. He has directed suggestive films such as The Adjuster (1991), his first known work abroad; Exótica (1994); The Sweet Hereafter (1997), based on the novel by R. Banks, Felicia´s Journey, 1999…) or Ararat (2001). His artistic work is centered in the field of installation. They have been shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublín, at Le Fresnoy, Francia, the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, Oxford and more recently at the Venice Biennale, 2001.

Elsken, Ed van der. Amsterdam (Holland), 1925-1990. Van der Elsken got interested in photography when he came to know the work of Weegee. in 1947. Settled in Paris, he started working at the Magnum Agency laboratory where he came to know MOMA´s curator Edward Steichen who selected his photographs for the Post-War European Photography (1953) and The Family of Man shows. From 1959 to 1969 and form 1967 to 1982 (then working for Avenue magazine) he traveled over the world shooting a great number of photographs and making several videos, activity that would lead to independent films and documentaries such as La cámara enamorada (1971) and Adiós (1990). The variety of his subjects range from classic photojournalism to love stories, bohemian life style, jazz music or instant photos taken in Amsterdam, Paris and Japan. He’s work has been shown in the Chicago Art Institute, 1955, the Stedelijk Musem, Amsterdam, in 1966, 1971, 1984, 1989 and 1991, at the Institut Neerlandais, París in 1986, in Bunkamura Gallery, Tokio, 1993, at the Konsthall, Rotterdam and the Photographers’ Gallery, London, both in 1996, at the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, en 2000, and at the Fundació “la Caixa”, Barcelona, in 2001.

Euba, Jon Mikel. Bilbao (Spain), 1967. Especially interested in narrative mechanisms, Euba utilises photography, as well as video and drawing, to create discontinuous stories, whether upon photographic media or large murals. Existent in his work is a discourse on the limits between what is real and what is fictitious, rife with personal experience, both in the subjects dealt with and the way of exhibiting them. The mise-en-scenes he photographs maintain a subtle alignment with what is real, with what is plausible, while being mysteriously unreal. He has exhibited in privately run galleries and in group shows, especially in Euskadi, among which his projects at Arteleku, in San Sebastián, Bilbao Arte, and Imago 99 in Salamanca are most worthy of mention.

Faucon, Bernard. Apt, Provence (France), 1950. Although he studied Philosophy at the Université de la Sorbonne, Paris, he has worked as a photographer since 1975. After his first artwork, characterized by a staging quality and devoted to toys, he photographed subjects related to space, natural elements and, very especially, to youth and adolescence. He has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums on an international basis and his artwork is part of some of the most important photographic collections around the world.

Fellman, Sandi. Detroit, Michigan (United States). She studied at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She lives and works in New York, combining a prolific career of commercial photography with work in the artistic arena. Her photographs revolve around diverse themes: flowers, abstract nudes of parents and children, her first child, fashion, dance, mural photography, and the compilation of a collection of photographs taken by women for the cosmetic company Avon. Her recent work, images of butterflies, beetles and other insects, demonstrates an entomological interest in the small wonders of nature. For the last twenty years, her photographs have been published and exhibited with regularity virtually all over the world. One of her most outstanding series is The Japanese Tattoo, which was part of the exhibition “Body Art”, in the American Museum of Natural History, in 1999. Her photographs can be found in numerous permanent collections, among which, most worthy of mention are those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MOMA, both in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum, L.A.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris and the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. Sandi Fellman is represented exclusively by the Edwin Houk Gallery, New York.

Figgis, Mike. Nairobi (Kenya), 1948. Director, screenwriter and composer. He settled in London where, before making his mark as a filmmaker, he studied music, performed with the R & B group The Gas Board and started making pop videos. He was a member of the British experimental theatre group The People Show for many years, before plunging into theatrical productions and eventually directing The House, an acclaimed TV production that led to his feature debut, Stormy Monday  (1988), a very stylish film which he also wrote. This impressive debut won him an offer to work in Hollywood, where he directed Internal Affairs  (1990); Liebestraum (191) and Mr. Jones (1993). Honoring his musical roots, he composed the scores for Stormy Monday; Liebestraum and Internal Affairs. Leaving Las Vegas earned him a Gold Globe (Globo de Oro) and the Concha de Plata for best director at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

Formiguera, Pere. Barcelona (Spain), 1952. Graduated in Arts (Art History) at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. For a long period of time he has been exploring the way time passes by as felt by different subjects. Thus, he has photographed certain individuals from their childhood to their maturity. He has focused particularly on his mother producing a series of systematic portraits of her. His portraits, close-ups and full-length, always depict naked bodies. Only time will leave its mark on the skin of the photographer’s models. In the 1980s he collaborated with Joan Fontcuberta in the series Fauna.

Frank, Robert. Zurich (Switzerland) 1924. In 1947 he settles in New York where he currently lives when he’s not spending time in Mabou (Canada). He studies in where in 1941 he starts doing still photography in the film industry, a job he would keep until 1945. In 1946 he publishes his first photography book. Once in New York he starts working for magazines such as Harpers’s Bazaar. After being fired he devotes himself completely to independent photography. He travels to Peru, Bolivia, Spain and other European countries. As an independent photographer he free lances for magazines and advertising. In 1958 he publishes he’s best known book The Americans, a very personal homage to the United States that was received both, with criticism and with the recognition of his photographic skills. After 1958 Robert Frank moves into cinema.  His relationship with Kerouac and Ginsberg leaves a strong influence in his work. In 1958 he shoots his first short film and in 1960 he creates the group New American Cinema alongside Peter Bogdanovich and Jonas Mekas, among others. That same year he shoots Sin of Jesus. Robert Frank is considered one of the most important authors in the realm of American experimental film. Among his films Life Dances on, 1980, C’est Vrai, 1990, Movig Pictues, 1994, Flamingo, 1996 and Fragments, 2000 are worth mentioning. His photographic work has been shown in the most important museums in the world, among them New York MOMA, the Whitney etc. In Spain his work has been shown at the Parpalló de Valencia and more recently at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia.

Freixa, Ferrán. Barcelona (Spain), 1950. He began working with photography around 1968, by 1969 he had already set up a photography lab and graphic design studio. Ferrán Freixa is an artist who has been able to combine his professional work within the world of graphic and interior design and architectural and industrial photography with his personal trajectory as an artist-photographer.   His photographs are characterized by a surprising while commonplace gaze over the compositional aspects of architecture and space, light and shadow and objects found by chance, all of it debating between a somewhat surrealist  aesthetic and an exquisite and abstract use of black and white. He has been included in important collective contemporary photography shows in New York, Tucson, New Mexico, Londres, Tremoli, Mexico and Paris. His work was also represented in the traveling exhibition Cuatro Direcciones: 1970-1990. His photographs have been acquired by museums and institutions in Spain, France, Switzerland and Mexico.

García Rodero, Cristina. Puertollano, Ciudad Real (Spain), 1949. She studied painting at the University Complutense de Madrid and holds a degree in Studio Art. She is professor of Photography at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de Madrid. Since the end of the 1960s she has worked as a professional photographer. She has undertaken several research projects on festivals, rituals and traditions in several countries: Spain, Cuba, Germany, Haiti… She has been awarded several prizes such as the Eugene Smith (New York, 1989), World Press Photo (1993),  Gellschaft Fur Photographie (Köln, 1990) and Premio Nacional de Fotografía in Spain (1996). Her work focuses on the exploration of festivals, rituals, and customs of very different societies as well as in their effects on ordinary people. She has exhibited in private galleries as well as in state institutions in Europe, the United States and Latin America. She has participated in the Venice Biennale.

García-Alix, Alberto. León (Spain), 1956. A photographer who is emblematic of an entire section of society and its attitudes, García-Alix is an autodidactic artist with a potent mixture of purity and classicism, a few drops of anxiousness for new forms and contents which stem from his own personal life. In 1967, he moves to Madrid to enroll in secondary school. Later, in 1975, he abandons his law studies to dedicate himself to a series of journeys and experiences that he will illustrate with photographs evolving from portraits of personages and urban tribes to more carefully contrived images, intimate narratives of sentiments and situations, which are prolonged throughout the decades, friends, couples, deaths and discoveries: an entire life. In 1999, he is awarded the National Photography Prize in Spain. Most well known are his portraits of characters from the ‘movida madrileña’ and other inhabitants of the night and the wild side of life, as well as his self-portraits and an extensive series of photographs about tattoos. In addition to his work as photographer, he participated quite actively in the publication of the magazine El Canto de la Tripulación, he has written scripts for films and documentaries and directed several films for television. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous spaces and galleries, among which is the Galería Moriarty, Galería Juana de Aizpuru, PhotoGalería and the Círculo de Bellas Artes, all in Madrid, and the the Tecla Sala, Hospitalet de Llobregat.

Geleynse, Wyn. Rotterdam (The Netherlands) 1947. Before his last show at the Galérie Antón Wéller (Paris, 2000), Wyn Geleynse who resides in Ontario, has had multiple individual exhibitions in Canada and elsewhere. Among them the one at the Centre d’Art Contemporain of Basse Normandie (France, 1997) and his participation at the Sao Paulo Biennale of 1987 stand out. His work is included in important public and private collections like the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, the Art Gallery of Windsor and the Fondazione Italiana per la Fotografía.

Genovés, Pablo. Madrid (Spain) 1959. In photographs and photo-montages, Pablo Genovés captures more than mere images. From behind their smooth, glossy surfaces there there emerges a dream vision of memory both fecund and personal. This is a reality encapsulated in the two distinct motifs running through his work: the human body and a celebration of food.

Giacomelli, Mario. Seningallia (Italy), 1925-2000. One of the central figures of Italian photography. In his youth, he studied typography and painting and wrote poetry. He began taking photographs in his thirties and his most important work dates from the 1950s. In his early work, a strong influence from the painting of Morandi as well as the poetry of Leopardi can be detected. His subjects, in highly contrasted black and white, demonstrate a kind of melancholy that is characteristic in all Giacomelli’s work. Although he took many trips to Tibet and Ethiopia, he lived almost his entire life in his home town on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, carrying out work based on the personages and landscapes of his environment. In 2001, shortly after his death, the first large scale retrospective show, La mia vitta entera, was shown at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome and exhibited his entire body of work for the first time. He had solo shows in galleries and museums all around the world, from the Pushkin State Museum in Moscow, in 1987 to the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, in 1995.

Glassford, Thomas. Laredo (United States), 1963. The artist, who lives in Mexico City, has shown individually in museums like the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca and the Museo de Monterrey, besides the usual gallery and international fair shows. His work stands out in collective exhibitions like Erógena (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, México and Stedelijk Museum voor Aktuelle Kunst, Gent, 2000), InSite 97 (San Diego-Tijuana), Así está la cosa. Instalación y arte objeto en América Latina (Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, ciudad de México 1997), Colección (MEIAC, Badajoz 1995) and the 5th Habana Biennale (1994).

Godard, Jean-Luc. Paris (France), 1930. A Swiss citizen he lives and works in Rolle. Director and screenwriter, Godard is considered one of the most singular filmmakers of the second half of the XXth century. At his beginnings around 1950, he was related to the French Nouvelle Vague alongside Truffaut, Rivette and Rohmer, and to the film magazines Gazette and Cahiers du Cinema, in which he published several theorical and critical texts. It is during these years that he makes movies of very different  genres like A bout de souffle, 1959, Le petit soldat, 1960, Une femme est une femme (1961), Les carabiniers, 1963, Pierrot, le fou, 1965, Week-End (1967) o La chinoise (1967), which will appear as the transitional movie to his more political and sociological period, a time in which he signed his works under the umbrella of the collective Dziga Vertov. From the seventies on the use of video will become a common resource in his films which range from the experimental to the more common structured pieces such as Tout va bien, 1972, Prénom: Carmen; 1983, Je vous salue Marie, 1985, Nouvelle Vague (1990). His passion for cinema, its history and the possibilities of editing with video and televisión will be a constant subject in his later work. His reflections are gathered in the book and film series Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1998).

Goicolea, Anthony. Georgia (USA), 1971. He has studied in Madrid as well as in the states of Georgia and New York. At present the artist lives and works in New York. He elaborates self-portraits that are included in the images he produces. These images are staged and include make-up work as well as light effects and digitization. In the staged scenes the photographer enacts characteristic scenes from puberty and adolescence: the first kiss, scatological scenes, games and fights… which appear to us as snapshots of incomplete stories. Between irony, horror and provocation, the cloning and multiplication of the ego, the vanity, producing provocative images which disturb the spectator despite their apparent innocence.

Goldin, Nan. Washington (U.S.A.) 1953. She lives and works in New York. Focusing on human relationships, fragile and demolishing at the same time, Goldin’s became one of the most internationally reputed bodies of work during the 1990s and one of the unquestionable references for young artists. She uses the photographic lens as a finger pointing to the wounds and the intimacy of a society marked by desolation and the effects of love and lack of love. Her close-ups, scant barriers and spurning of current morals and modesty make her photographs harsh and yet endearing documents gripping the viewers’ memory like parts of their own experiences. Her series on her friends, lovers and family members have become authentic symbols of sentimental relations at the turn of the century. Her most outstanding works include The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1981-1996 and I’ll be your mirror, which demonstrate her way of working: in series, photographs and projections at the same time, with musical accompaniment, which in her latest series have become short and medium length videos. She has exhibited in the most important centers around the world, most noteworthy of which are the Whitney Museum, New York, the Kunsthalle, Viena, and, in 2001, at the Pompidou in Paris, an exhibition that will travel to the MNCA Reina Sofia, Madrid, in 2002.

Gómez, Germán. Madrid (Spain), 1972. He holds a degree in Studio Art (Photography) from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He has also graduated in Special Education. He combines his work as a photographer with his job as instructor in a school for disabled children. He has participated in several contests and one-man and group exhibitions. He has also been awarded several grants. In the year 2001 he has won the Injuve prize of photography for his series Yo, tú, él, ella, nosotros, nosotras... His artwork focuses on portrait photography and his best-known series depicts disabled teenagers.

Gonnord, Pierre. France, 1963. Has been living and working in Madrid since 1988. His work is centered on portraits of young men and women, in which the faces and a few other meaningful elements conform portraits that are cold and isolated from time and place. He has exhibited, for example, at the Galería Jauna de Aizpuru and the Canal de Isabel II, both in Madrid, and at the Filomena Soares gallery in Lisbon. His work is included in the following public collections: MNCA Reina Sofía, Madrid; Casa Europea de la Fotografía, Paris; Colección Comunidad de Madrid; Fundación de Fútbol Profesional, Madrid; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo of Alava. He was presented by the Juana de Aizpuru gallery at ARCO, Art Basel and Paris Photo. 

González Torres, Félix. Guáimaro (Cuba) 1957 - New York (United States) 1996. Belonging to Cuban emigration, he ends up in Spain first, then in Puerto Rico and finally in New York, with visits to Miami. His work, difficult to define, consists of installations, photographs, prints and videos, all with a powerfully subjective and autobiographical content. His work has recently been shown at the Sprengel Museum of Hannover, the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, the MoCA of Los Angeles, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Guggenheim in New York and the Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago de Compostela.

González, Juan. Madrid (Spain), 1973. She lives and works in Valencia. Educated at the University of Alicante and at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios of Valencia with a specialty in Image and Sound, he has already received several grants and awards throughout his short but successful career. Inhabited or stripped spaces, from a vital, social or even intimate perspective, are the motifs of of his different series: Habitaciones, focusing on the empty rooms of cloister nuns, Valeriola, a sort of archeology and residue of the everyday in the deserted landscape of the street, or Salones, the representation of the ritual comedy of collective, depersonalized banquettes and luncheons, where all the facial features of the guests have been eliminated. His work has been exhibited in Spanish institutions such as the Canal Isabel II, Madrid (1999) or the IVAM, Valencia, in addition to international events such as the Miami Fair (2001), with the Luis Adelantado gallery, from Valencia.

Göttlicher, Björn. Bamberg (Germany), 1972. Trained as a photo-designer at the Fachhochscule of Dortmund and the Fine Arts College of Barcelona, where he was a student of Manolo Laguillo. For a time, he lived in Paris, where he worked as an intern in Gerhard Vormwald’s studio. His work Polaserien, an intimate series that robs very personal instants from unknown people,  earned him a name in the photography world. His latest project, carried out in 2000, In memoriam Barri X, is a series of analytical photos about a neighborhood in Barcelona. At present, he lives in Barcelona and works as an architectural and reportage photographer in Spain and Germany. He has published his work in several international magazines such as Merian, Spiegel Reporter, La Vanguardia, Altair and Camera Austria.

Graham, Dan. Urbana, Illinois (United States) 1942. Since the mid-1960s, Graham has produced an important body of art and theory that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historical, social and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems. Architecture, popular music, video and television are among the focuses of his provocative investigations, which are articulated in essays, performances, installations, videotapes and architectural/sculptural designs.  Graham began using film and video in the 1970s, creating installation and performance works that actively engage the viewer in a perceptual and psychological inquiry into public and private, audience and performer, objectivity and subjectivity. Restructuring space, time and spectatorship in a deconstruction of the phenomenology of viewing, his early installations often incorporate closed-circuit video systems within architectural spaces. The viewer’s perception is manipulated and displaced through such devices as time delay, projections, surveillance and mirrors. Graham has published numerous critical essays and is the author of Video-Architecture-Television (1980). His work is represented in the collections of numerous major institutions in the United States and Europe including the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and The Tate Gallery, London. He has had retrospective exhibitions in Eindhoven, Oxford, Berne, Chicago and Pert. He has been represented internationally in several group exhibitions, festivals and institutions. He currently lives in New York.

Greenaway, Peter. (England) His artistic studies are oriented toward painting and, in 1965, he starts working as a film editor. In 1966, he begins to make his own films, although, from this date on, he simultaneously fulfills the role of painter, novelist and illustrator. With the premiere of The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982, he is acclaimed by critics around the world as one of the most original and outstanding creators of the contemporary film scene. His most worthy films include The Belly of an Architect, 1987; Drowning by Numbers, 1988; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, 1989; Prospero’s Book, 1991; The Baby of Macon, 1993 and The Pillow Book, 1995. He has received several international cinematographic prizes. As a plastic artist, he has exhibited in both private and public galleries, the most outstanding of which are the shows held at the Palais de Tokio, Paris; the Australia Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico D.F.; and the Cultural Center of the Bank of Brasil in Río de Janeiro. In Spain, he has exhibited at the Casa de la Parra in Santiago de Compostela. Of all his artistic activities, his role as curator is of utmost importance, as he has curated exhibits as relevant as that at the Boymans-van Beuningen of Rotterdam in 1991, The Physical Self; Watching Water at the Palazzo Fortuny of Venice; Flying Over Water at the Fundación Miró in Barcelona, and he is to carry out a curatorship at the Biennial of Valencia at 2001.

Grimonprez, Johan. (Trinidad Isles), 1962. He studied at the Akademie voor Schone Kunsten, the School of Visual Arts in New York, the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York and the Jan Van Eyck Akademie of Maastricht. At present, he lives in Gent and New York. His works, in video, have been shown in the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Documenta X of Kassel, the Deste Foundation in Athens, the Kunsthaus in Zurich and, in Spain, at the Centro Gallego de Arte Contporáneo in Santiago de Compestela. His most known works, such as “Dial History”or the mobile video theatre “Prends garde! A jouer au fantôme, on le devient”, constitute a scheme of interrelations between visual language, cultures, history, politics, means of communication, irony and humour, wherein violence and fear are contemplated as everyday objects, demythologised and decontextualised into a dynamic collage of television sequences of documentaries and news broadcasts.

Gursky, Andreas. Leizpig (Germany), 1955. He grew up in Düsseldorf, where he lives and works. He took up photography thanks to his father, a successful commercial photographer. At school, he was a student of Otto Steinert, at the Folkwangschule de Essen, and of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie de Dusseldorf. His photographs of human or urban throngs, highways, colossal architecture, minimalist interiors, sports fields, and immense and sublime landscapes have characterized a good part of the German photographic tradition of the 1990s. His high quality works, in color and large formats, enter the world with close-ups that become opulent and spectacular reflections of the contemporary art scene and symbols of Western civilization. He is represented by the galleries Monika Sprüth, Cologne, and Mathew Marks, New York. Among his diverse exhibitions, well worth mentioning are those held at Portikus, Frankfurt, 1995; Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 1998; Serpentine Gallery, London, 1999; MoMA, New York, and Palacio de Velázquez, MNCA Reina Sofía, Madrid, in 2001.

Hilliard, David. In a selection of this individual and collective shows his intense presence in the Spanish circuit stands out since 1997 when he presented A Life in Progress at the Espai Fotográfic Can Baste in Barcelona. He has also had shows at the Patio de Escuelas de la Universidad de Salamanca and at the Centro de Fotografía de Tenerife. Colectivelly he has been included in 7 x 7 x 7 at the Sala Rekalde in Bilbao, Retratos de Todos los Días at the Canal de Isabel II and ARCO 98. His work has been featured in Blind Spot magazine and is part of private and public collections in the United States, Spain and France. In 1995 he was awarded a Fullbright fellowship.

Hilliard, John. Lancaster (Great Britain), 1945. At present, he lives in London and teaches at the Slade School of Fine Art. Hilliard’s work expounds a great variety of theoretical and formal options relating to representation, to the survival of memory, to the superposition and dialogue of surfaces and images. It is not a new formalism but rather profoundly theoretical expositions applied to the photographic image. Among his most outstanding themes are the limits of identity and representation, real and phantasmagorical, and, indeed, he creates a mise-en-scene that is sometimes violent and sometimes ironic, but always mysterious. He has exhibited, in addition to in dozens of privately run galleries throughout Europe, at the MOMA of Oxford, the Ikon Gallery of Birmingham, the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, the ICA of London, the Kunsthaus Dresden, Kolnischer Kunstverein in Cologne and, in Spain, in 1999, at the Centro de la Fotografía de Salamanca and at the Palacio de Revillagigedo in Gijón.

Hine, Lewis. Wisconsin (USA), 1874 - New York (USA), 1940. In 1900 he enrolled as a student of the Department of Sociology of Chicago University and, later on, at the Columbia University, New York. He starts taking photographs in 1904 although he would not photograph regularly until graduation. He became instructor and director  of a photo-club. From 1906 to 1917 he developed a project for the National Child Labour Committee (NCLC). Since his enrollment in the Red Cross he traveled to several European countries, such as France, Italy and Greece. His style evolves from a plain, objective documentary work to a more subjective style and interpretation of reality. His work Child Labour in Carolina was a determinant factor in a new labor law. In 1930 he was contracted to document the construction work of the Empire State Building of New York, his most famous work that he would define as “interpretations of industry”. He is considered the greatest exponent of social and documentary American photography, and his influence has been profound in social photography around the world. His work is part of the most important photographic collections of the world and has been exhibited on an international basis. In Spain, IVAM, Valencia, has organized a one-man exhibition of his photographs.

Hopper, Dennis. Dodge City, Kansas (United States), 1936. Currently living in Venice, California. Hired by Warner as an actor he played a series of minor roles in numerous films. In 1968 he wrote, directed and featured in the very successful Easy Rider that became a critical sensation. It was followed by The last movie (1971) and Out of The Blues (1980). He made important contributions as an actor in films like Der amerikanische Freund (W. Wenders, 1977) and Apocalypse Now (F.F. Coppola, 1979) or Blue Velvet (D. Lynch, 1986). His artistic work that goes back to 1961, is mainly photographic although he has made some paintings and performances. It has been shown at the Fort Worth Art Center, Texas; Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Kunsthalle Basel; Sala Parpalló, Valencia; Galerie Hans Mayer, Dusseldorf; Parco Gallery, Tokio. The Stedelijk Museum in Ámsterdam showed a retrospective of his work this year.

Illana, Fernando. Talavera de la Reina, Toledo (Spain), 1950. At present, he lives and works in Vitoria. In his work, the material and language employed spring from the conceptual objectives of the artist, who, despite the use of photography in some of his work, cannot be considered a photographer but an artist working from conceptual premises. Since 1974, he has achieved a solid preeminence with solo and group shows in Northern Spain and international fairs like ARCO and Art Basel, among others. His work has been present in exhibitions such as 40m2 Utiles 92, Grand Palais, Paris, 1992; Adentro Afuera, Galería Trayecto, Vitoria, 1996; Memoria y Topografía, Galería Vanguardia, Bilbao, 1998; Art Forum Berlin, 1999. 

Jaar, Alfredo. Born in 1956 in Santiago de Chile In his photographic installations, Alfredo Jaar offers a radical critique of the western conception of a world divided between the centre (the west) and the periphery (the others). By giving a face and a voice to populations which are still struggling for their recognition and dignity, he evokes a world in which we are all "others", and in which all faces have their own individual stories of oppression, resistance and march towards freedom. A selection of his recent exhibitions includes Francke and Schulte Gallery, Berlin and the Johannesburg Biennal in 1997, Happy End, Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Germany and Macht/Onmacht, MUKHA, Antwerp in 1996. He has publisehed more than 30 artists books that record his trips around the world. He currently lives and works in New York.

Jaar, Alfredo. Santiago de Chile (Chile), 1956. At present, he lives in New York City. He is a conceptual artist who habitually uses photography in his installations. In the entirety of his work, Alfredo Jaar offers a radical criticism of the Western conception of the world, which divides it into the center (the Western world) and the periphery (the others). By giving the peoples who are still fighting for recognition and dignity a voice, he evokes a world in which we are all ‘others’, and in which each face has its own individual history of oppression, resistence and march toward freedom. A selection of his recent exhibits includes the following: Francke and Schulte Gallery, Berlin; Johannesburg Biennial, 1997; Happy End, Kunsthalle of Dusseldorf; Macht/Onmacht, MUKHA, Amberes, 1996; and, most recently, the Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona. He has published more than 30 art books that register his artwork and his voyages around the world.

Kertesz, André. Budapest (Hungary) 1894 – New York (United States) 1985. While serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army in the Balkans, Kertész started taking pictures that documented the hungarian revolution of 1918. In 1917 he was already working as a commercial photographer for the newspaper  Erkedes Ujsag.  That same year he travelled to Paris where he set up his studio as a portrait artist and illustrator participating of the artistic circle in Montparnasse where he photographed various artists and writers. Alongside his independent work for several magazines he started showing his artistic work in 1927. He became a very popular photographer thanks to his urban images of Paris in the thirties. Taken with a Leica they came out with a kind of spontaneous air that was an audience pleaser. His Distortions date also from these years: photographs of bodies reflecting in distorted mirrors. He was an inspiration for Brassaï, Capa or Cartier-Bresson for his way of capturing the poetic side of Paris with his camera. In 1936 he moves to New York where he makes fashion and interior photography for Condé Nast publications. This city will also be continously captured through his lens. He was awarded several honors and prizes, in 1974 he received form the French government the title of Commendeur de l’Ordre des Arts et Léttres. His works have been shown around the world, from the MOMA, to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris or Kassel’s Documenta.

Kiarostami, Abbas. Teheran (Iran), 1940. He studied fine arts and worked as a painter, poster designer and advertising cinema technician. In 1969 he created the Cinematographic Department for the Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescence Institute; subsequently he shot several didactic short films and dedicated three feature films to the complicated educational situation in Iran. Zir e darakhtan e zeyton (1994), earned him the Espiga de Oro Award at the Valladolid Film Festival. However, for some critics, it is in the earlier film Zendegi Edameh Dara, (1992) were he reached the maximum expression of his creative work. His work is frequently present at art shows and exhibitions and it has been made known to art world mainly through his activities at La Galerie de France or his participation in collective shows like La ciudad de los cineastas, CCCB, in Barcelona this year.

Kubrick, Stanley. Manhattan, New York (United States), 1928 – Hertfordshire, London (United Kingdom), 1999. He began his work as a photographer for Look Magazine between 1945-1950 but he soon directs his attention to cinema. Gifted with an obsessive intelligence and the basic resources of the craft, he came to position himself as one of the best known directors of the second half of the XXth century through films that cover every film genre: The Killing, 1956; Paths of Glory, 1958; Spartacus, 1960; Lolita 1962; (Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb, 1963; 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968; A Clockwork Orange, 1971; Barry Lyndon (1975); The Shinning, 1980); Full Metal Jacket, 1987. Eyes Wide Shut (1999), was his last and posthumous  movie.

Lehtola, Jouko. Helsinki (Finland), 1963. Studies art, design and photography at the University of Helsinki. His artwork has been extensively exhibited in his country (where he has been awarded the most important prizes and grants for young photographers). These pictures focus on youth from different points of view. His best-known series are Young Heroes (1995-1996),  Urban Youth (1997-2000) and Marked Skin (1999). His images of youngsters in parties, discos and meetings, and of young people drunk offer an accurate representation of some habits and customs of Western youth.

Leonard, Zoe. Liberty, New York (United States of America), 1961. Since the eighties  Zoe Leonard has been an active participant in the artworld and in various areas that go form photography to video, film and theater. Besides a prolific series of collective shows around the world (Israel, Croatia, Switzerland, Australia or Poland among others), she has recently showed individually at the Centre National de la Photographie (Paris 1998) and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia 1998).  In 1997 she was included in the  Whitney’s Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art en Nueva York.

Lobato, Xurxo. A Coruña (Spain), 1956. He lives and works in A Coruña. With an undergraduate degree in Geography and History from the University of Santiago de Compostela, he has been a graphic reporter for several periodicals El País, Cambio 16, Der Spiegel  as well as the agency Cover. At present, he is director of photography and graphic archives at La Voz de Galicia. The contrasts and cohabitation in rural and vernacular contexts in Galicia and the penetrations and imbalances of urban post modernity characterize Lobato’s images, taken as representative fragments of a society in which kitsch and picturesque is blended with the tenderness and melancholy of the Atlantic landscape that flanks the “Camino de Santiago”. Among his numerous publications, most noteworthy are Imaxes da arte en Galicia, 1991, Foundation Barrié, A Coruña; La flecha amarilla, 1998, El País-Aguilar, Madrid; Compostela, tradición y vanguardia,  Pub. Lunwerg, 2000. His work has been shown, among other centers, at the Caixa Galicia Foundation, A Coruña, 1996; Círculo de Bellas Artes, 1997, yandPhotogalería, 2002, both in Madrid.

Lockhart, Sharon. Norword, Massachusetts (USA), 1964. At present she lives and works in Los Angeles, California. After completing her studies of Studio Art in San Francisco and being awarded various grants like the Rockefeller Foundation film/ video/ multimedia fellowship, she has developed a work based on photography and video. Among others, she has exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago,  Boijmans van Beuningen of Rotterdam, Deichtorhalle of Hamburg as well as in the last edition of the Lyon Biennial. The influence of film classics and the constant reference to literature is profound. One of her most usual topics is adolescence and the transition from puberty to maturity. Her images have a strong psychological content.

Lüthi, Urs. Luzern (Switzerland) 1947. The artist who currently lives between Munich and Kassel in Germany, turns to all kinds of languages and supports in his work, photography being just one of them. His work is characterized  by the way in which it involves his own life and physical presence in each piece, giving it a dramatic weigh that contrasts with the apparent banality of a happy world and with certain surrealist aspects. The idea that the artist is “a mirror” for others is present throughout his work. He has exhibited individually and collectively in hundreds of cities around the world, in private galleries and museums as well as in public institutions. His last exhibit, Run For Your Life: Placebos and Surrogates, has been shown in the Swiss Institute in New York this year. He has been a professor in the Kunsthochschule at Kassel University since 1994.

Lynch, David. Missoula, Montana (United States), 1946. He studies art during the sixties. At first interested in painting, his film career begins with the disturbing Eraserhead, 1976 that would be followed by The Elephant Man, 1980 or the legendary Blue Velvet, 1986. He alternated his work between movies and TV and eventually gained massive recognition for his directing job in the series Twin Peaks. He won the Cannes Palm D’Or Wild at Heart, 1990 that would be followed by Lost Highway, 1997, The Straight Story, 1999 and Mulholland Drive (2001). Painting and photography stand side by side in his artistic work that has been shown in galleries and museums around the world, from the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, to the Tokio Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokio, including the Sala Parpalló in Valencia.

Madoz, Chema. Madrid (Spain) 1958.His first photographic show in 1985 was followed by  several individual and collective shows in galleries and museums throughout Spain and other countries. His work revolves around the universe of objects and multiple appearances, games and associations in which the poetry of the thing  and the memory of surrealism are always present. His photographs, always in black and white, has helped to make way in national museums for the younger generations of photographers. Since1994 he’s always present at ARCO. Last year the MNCARS dedicated him an important exhibition where he showed his work from the last ten years. His photographs are included in important institutional collections that include: CGAC, IVAM, Fundación Juan March, Marugame Hirai Museum (Japan) and Fundación Telefónica.

Mann, Sally. Lexington, Virginia (USA), 1951. She lives in Lexington with her family, in the same house where she was born. She has been awarded several prizes and grants like NEA, NEH The Friends of Photography and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Despite her  strong attachment to her native town she has exhibited her work and taught classes and seminars in the USA and Europe. Her best-known work focuses on growth, the childhood and puberty of Jessie, Emmett and Virginia, her offspring. Although her later work deals with the landscape of her native Virginia, her family portraits (Immediate Family) taken from the 1980s on have defined her work, often considered an affront to morality. Her work has become a symbol of contemporary photography.

Mar, Marina del. Almería (Spain), 1963. Her work as press photographer allows her to access the world of inaugurations and social events that have very diverse facets. Beyond the informative task, she develops a visual investigation of social aspects that are always very involved with the world of women. Families, leisure, consumerism and beauty in contemporary society and, indeed, high society cocktail parties, openings and public encounters are the themes most often touched on in her works. Most outstanding in them is the direct approach and the themes centered around the cinema world. She has exhibited in photography festivals such as PhotoEspaña, Madrid, 1999 and Encontros da Imagem, International festival at Prague, in 2000.

Marker, Chris. Neuilly-sur-Seine (France), 1921. Related since the fifties with the practice of modern documentary, the ample work of Marker –that includes classic and unclassifiable titles as La jetée (1962), Le joli mai (1963), Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977), Sans soleil (1982) or Le tombeau d’Alexandre/The Last Bolshevik (1993)- has sailed for decades between film, writing and photography. During the nineties  he also explored the fields of television, video-installation  (Silent Movie, 1995) and digital and interactive supports (Inmemory, CD-Rom, 1998, Editions du Centre Pompidou, Paris). His last film works are Level Five (1996) and Une journee d’Andrei Arsenevitch (2000), as well as the open work Roseware (since 1998), or the screenplay for Twelve Monkeys (1995), directed by Terry Gilliam. His screenings and video installations have been shown at the  Fundació Antoni Tápies, Barcelona, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla, in 1999, as web as in collective shows like Video Spaces: Eight Installations, MOMA, New York, 1995, or Lugares de la memoria, EACC, Castellón, 2001.

Markus, Kurt. Roundup, Montana (United States), 1947. Kurt Markus has had various lives as a photographer, beginning with his notable work on jeans in the American West. Fashion photography is his most recent interest. Whatever the theme, he is most known for his sense of realism and his decidedly direct and not the least bit artificial approach to the creation of images. Kurt Markus’s photographs have appeared in a wide range of magazines and books, including the French, British and Australian editions of Vogue as well as Esquire, Mirabella, Travel & Leisure, New York Times Magazine, Elle, Men’s Journal, American Way, New Yorker Entertainment Weekly, Interview and Harper’s Bazaar. In 1994, Rolling Stone selected Markus as one of the five photographers to participate in a special 25^th anniversary edition presenting the living legends of rock-n-roll. Following his three books on jeans, After Barbed Wire (Twelvetrees, 1985), Buckaroo (New York Graphic Society, 1987) and Cowpuncher (Wild Horse Island Press, 2000), was a small monograph on fashion photography, Dreaming Georgia (Cut, 1994); and Boxers (Twin Palms, 1998). He has carried out advertising campaigns for clients such as Calvin Klein, Sony, Armani, Nike, AT&T, Perry Ellis, Sonia Bogner, Levi’s, BMW, Giorgio of Beverly Hills and Tommy Hilfiger. He has exhibited his work at the Staley-Wise Gallery, New York; Photology, Milan and Parco Gallery, Tokyo, among others. 

McAlinden, Mikkel. Oslo, (Norway), 1963. He studied at the National College of Art and Design in Bergen. Professor of photography at Kunsthogskolen, Bergen, he lives in Oslo. He has won a significant number of grants in his own country and his work forms part of many of Norway’s most important photography collections. In an effort to convey ideas on perception, he feels that computer-digital techniques permit him freedom to transcend the restrictions of the traditional analogue camera. Being the digital artist he is, his well honed website is a virtual gallery exhibiting several of his works, including Endgame. In this series, he explores the visual possibilities of a poker game as a pretext for the exchange of perceptual information. He has had solo exhibitions at the Ostfold Artist Centre, Fredrikstad, 1999; Rogaland Artist Centre, Stavanger, 1999 and Gallery K., Oslo, 1999.

Meene, Hellen van. Alkmaar (Netherland), 1972. The artist lives and works in Alkmaar. She is one of the most outstanding examples of renewal and power of contemporary Dutch photography. Her influence on the work of other photographers has been called “the Rineke effect”. Despite her age she has had one-man shows in London, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Los Angeles and Milano. In 1999 she was awarded the Charlotte Kohler Prize. Her photographs deal with female adolescents immersed in a process of growth and transformation, and reflect a feeling of solitude and isolation which is characteristic in these kind of subjects.

Mendieta, Ana. Havana (Cuba), 1948 - New York (United States), 1985. A performing artist and photographer, she also made several videos of her performances. In her work, there is a presence of the rituals of blood, of life, of sex and of death, with ambient elements of Cuban saint worship as well as those of the violence of a society from which she found it impossible to remain aloof. She died in New York after a violent argument with her husband, the sculptor Carl André, under circumstances which were never fully clarified. The body and its trace are the axis of her work, which was exhibited all around the world while she was alive and continues to be exhibited after her death. Amongst her solo shows, most noteworthy are those at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, the New Museum of New York and the City Museum of Helsinki. In Spain, an extensive selection of her work was seen at the Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago de Compostela, in 1996. 

Messager, Annette. Berck-sur-Mer, (France), 1943. She lives and works in Paris. In 1960, she enrolls in the Ecole National Superieure del Arts Decoratifs of Paris. In 1965, a photography prize enables her to travel around the world. Influenced by Jean Dubuffet’s art brut, she elaborates objects linked to her own daily life with fabric, newspapers, drawings and photographs. With an autobiographical accent, her work tackles subjects such as the body, identity, childhood, obsessions, fears, perversions, etc. by way of media that range from drawing to sculpture or installations of objects and photographs. Among her most outstanding exhibitions are the 1995 retrospective at the Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in the Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid, in 1988.

Michals, Duane. Pennsylvania (United States), 1932. Michals was born into a typical Pennsylvania working-class family. He became interested in art, took a BA and then went on to study to become a graphic designer, leaving this course for various jobs in publishing. In 1958 he went on a trip to Russia taking with him a borrowed camera to record his visit. When he saw the simple straightforward portraits that resulted from this experience he decided to become a photographer. Michals enjoys a successful career in advertising and editorial work despite never owning a studio or having learnt to use studio flash. He attributes much of his success to a lack of training, of never having learnt the ‘rules’ of photography. Two major aspects that Michals has developed in his work were the use of photo-sequences notably Things are Queer and Alice’s Mirror, and also the integration of text into his work by the simple device of writing on his photographs. The yuxtaposition of images and different narrative techniques have been the landmark of his work. In this sense he has pioneered important photographic innovations. He has also manipulated photography through drawing and painting. He has published numerous books besides the catalogues for his exhibits, most of them compilations of his series. This kind of work, which he particularly enjoys, includes children’s books. As a photographer he has had shows almost everywhere in the world, though probably one of the most important ones is his individual exhibit at the MOMA in the seventies. After that his work has been seen in important museums as well as in some of the best private and public collections around the world. In Spain his last important show was held at the Museo Reina Sofía in 1997. Duane Michals is one of the most influential photographers within the younger generations.

Misrach, Richard. Los Angeles, California (United States), 1949. He begins studying mathematics at the University of Berkeley before switching to psychology. His surfing and skiing hobbies take him around the United States and lead him to discover the Californian desert, one of the main subjects in his later work. Since his youth, he is an active and critical member of anti-war groups. His work has always developed in unison with the publication of his books and portfolios, a facet he considers essential for the comprehension of his photographs. Landscapes and human figures, and especially desert regions and objects found in their solitude, occupy the greatest part of his work, marked, on the other hand, by a constant photographic investigation, a permanent criticism and an attempt to subvert the habitual means of presentation and channelling of photographic work. He has published a series of books with his work on the desert; “The Chants of the Desert”. An important part of this series proceeds from some pages from Playboy magazine used as rifle shooting targets, with which he carries out several series in different formats. Among the outstanding awards he has received in the United States are the National Arts Award and the Guggenheim Prize. He has exhibited at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, at the MOMA in New York, at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico D.F., at the Art Walker Center in Minneapolis, at the Museum of Modern Arte in San Francisco, etc. In Spain, his work was exhibited in Granada, at the Palacio de los Condes de Gabia and, in Madrid, at the Canal de Isabel II, in 1999. 

Moffatt, Tracey. Brisbane (Australia), 1960. At present she lives and works in New York and Sydney. Her work, strongly narrative, is devoted to photography and film, video, musical and drama. The atmosphere of violence and surprise that are present in her work are related to life under extremely hard conditions and with the harshness and injustice of many personal relationships. She has exhibited recently in the Kunsthalle of Vienna, the Australian Center for Photography of Sydney, the Deichtorhalle in Hamburg and the Photography Centre of Paris. An extensive selection of her work has been on display in 1999 at an exhibition organized by “la Caixa” Foundation, Barcelona, in collaboration with the Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, CGAC. Her work has been included in archives, libraries and movie theaters in the USA and Australia. Her photographic work forms part of the collections of the Folkwang Museum of Essen, the MOCA of Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Photography of Japan and, of course, the main museums and private collections throughout Australia.

Moleres, Fernando. Bilbao (Spain), 1963. Educated as a nurse, until 1994 he has combined this professional activity with numerous travels and a progressive dedication to photography. His series Niños trabajadores, initiated  in 1990 in the sugar cane plantations of South Africa, was awarded a Photopress prize. This award allowed him to document the exodus of refugees in Kurdistan a year after. In the same style as Sebastião Salgado and Lewis Hine, Fernando Moleres deals with certain aspects of the human tragedy, particularly with the exploitation of children in more than 30 countries. These new series depict children and teenagers involved in wars, prostitution, hard labor and other misfortunes. The project Niños trabajadores has received prizes and grants in Spain, USA, Sweden and Netherland, and has been published in magazines and newspapers on an international basis. Furthermore, the artist has had numerous exhibitions of his work and a monographic volume of his photographs has been published in five languages.

Morimura, Yasumasa. Osaka (Japan), 1951. He studied at the Kyoto University of Art, between 1971 and 1978. Since then, he has participated in group and solo shows all around the world. He exhibited at the Aperto de la Bienal de Venecia in 1988 and at the Metrópolis show in Berlin in 1991. His large format color photograph are focused on a subjective reinterpretation of the masterpieces of the history of art and Western culture, from impressionist painters such as Manet and Degas, to classics like Goya and Velázquez, or Van Gogh, Duchamp an Frida Khalo, among many others, in addition to actresses such as Marilyn Monro, Marlene Dietrich or personalities like Elvis Presley. The figures are always his own portrait, as he is one of the pioneers of this utilization of digital technologies in self-portraits as a critical strategy in contemporary photography.

Mundet, Llùcia. Barcelona (Spain), 1967. Earning a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at the University of Barcelona, in 1991, she studied film at the Hochschüle für Bildende Künste Braunschweig in Germany. She has won several awards and grants (Landes Neidersachsen, 1999; Premio Lux, 2001) and she has participated in group shows, as a photographer as well as a video artist, and she had a solo show at the Kunstverein in Gifhorn. The Proyecto Mundets 01, to which the photograph we have published belongs, deals with a series of people who carry the surname Mundet and are photographed with staging techniques and all shorts of typically commercial resources.

Muniz, Vik. São Paulo (Brazil), 1961. At present the artist lives and works in New York. Since the end of the 1980s the photographer’s work has been on display in exhibitions in museums and galleries like the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, Museo de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro, and the Center for Creative Photography of Tucson, among others. His work deals with the most usual daily icons of modern society from the perspective of Brazilian culture. His series Sugar’s Children and his photographs of drawings made of chocolate and other materials, objects used by the artist to study the iconography of the world of art and culture, are particularly interesting.

Navarro, Rafael. Zaragoza (Spain) 1940. His first solo exhibition dates form 1973 and since then he has kept on showing and teaching photography workshops around the world. Several publications about his work have been edited in Switzerland and Italy. His work has always evolved in series, revolving specially around the subject of the nude body. He has been one of the Spanish photographers who have treated the theme of abstraction in photography with more depth.  He also pioneered the concept of the autonomy of the photographic work of art. His work is included in private and public collections around the world.

Okón, Yoshua. Mexico. D.F. (Mexico) 1970. He studied art at the Concordia University of Montreal and received a masters in Visual Art from UCLA, Los Angeles, California. He has obtained several grants such as the Fullbright scholarship for the years 2000-2002, “Jóvenes Creadores¨ from the National Fund for Culture and Art in Mexico and the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1998. He is founder and director of “La Panadería”, a space coordinated by artists for debates and exhibitions of contemporary art. He has mainly shown his work, always critical about the social establishment and existing rules of conduct, in France, the United States and Mexico.

Olaf, Erwin. Hilversum (Netherlands), 1959. He studied journalism at the University of Utrecht, in 1977 and, in the early 1980s, he moved to Amsterdam where he worked as assistant to Andre Ruigrok, who taught him photography. His first group show was held in 1983 at the University of Amsterdam. His work lies between creative and commercial photography as he has carried out numerous advertising campaigns and his photographs have been chosen for the covers of many design and fashion magazines, such as Vinyl. In 1985, he published his first book, Faces in a City, a collection of journalistic and creative portraits. His series Chessmen won the Young European Photographer award in 1987 and was exhibited  at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. His latest and most well known series are Mature, Fashion Victims, Real Blood and Paradise. These have been exhibited at the Valencia Biennieal and Paris Photo 2001; Flatland Gallery, Utrecht; Lawrence Miller Gallery, New York; and Espacio Mínimo, Madrid, among others.

Opie, Catherine. Ohio (United States), 1961. Settled in Los Angeles, this photographer earned a name in New York after her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 1995. Her photographs of members of the fetishist community of Los Angeles, with their tattoos, perforations, piercings, etc., were celebrated by the public for their forcefulness, their dignity and their silent beauty. Her most recent work furthers her commitment to the ideas of community and autobiography. Her most noteworthy exhibitions were those held at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; The Museum of Louisiana; Humlebaek, Denmark; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Konstmuseet, Malmö, Sweden, and the Kunstmuseum of Bonn. In Spain, she has exhibited in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Barcelona and at the Galería Soledad Lorenzo in Madrid. 

Pierre et Gilles met in 1976 and since then they have worked as a team exhibiting their photographic work in various collective venues in France and elsewhere.  In 1993 they were awarded first prize at the Grand Prix de Photographie de la Ville de Paris.  In Spain they were recently included in the exhibitions Cocido y crudo (MNCARS, Madrid 1994/95) and Le Visage voilé-Travestissement et identité (Koldo Mitxelena Kulturenea, Donosita 1997) besides their important individual show at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia (1997). This year they have been showing at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Pinal, Andrés. Vigo (Spain), 1969. Educated at the Fine Arts College of Pontevedra, where he teaches to this day. His first artistic endeavors were as a sculpture, but he ended up switching to photography and the field of audiovisuals. The body, as a warm stage for metaphorical and allegorical proposals, is a recurring theme in his black and white images, characterized by an enigmatic atmosphere, of surrealistic legacies and symbolic fantasies. Among his most noteworthy exhibitions is the one held at the Galería Bacelos, Vigo, as well as his participation in  group shows at the Auditorio de Galicia and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, CGAC, both in Santiago de Compostela; Casa das Artes, Vigo; Salas de la Comunidad, Madrid; Galería Marisa Marimón, Ourense, in addition to his presence at ARCO 2000.

Prince, Richard. Panama Canal Zone, 1949. The artist lives and works in New York. Perhaps due to an advertisement educational background, Richard Prince has based his work on the appropriation of ready-made images from advertisements on magazines, television, or even directly from film and television still photographs. He works particularly with images that imply desire as well as clichés of our consumer society; thus, his work can be placed between appropriation and a new pop style. Among his exhibitions it is worth mentioning the following: Haus der Kunst in Munich, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen of Rotterdam, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of New York, and Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf.

Prinz, Bernhard.(Fürth, Bayern, 1953). He lives and works in Hamburg. By way of photography, he revises the mise en scene of traditional themes in painting, with compositions full of symbolism and a grandiose and rather tromp-l’oeil presentation. Always in color, his still-lifes or his skyscapes as well as his portraits of women, always mean something more than what can be seen. The titles, names of goddesses, of architectural elements, of philosophical concepts, offer keys for approaching to each subject. He has exhibited in myriad solo and group shows, among which most outstanding were those held at the Serpentine Gallery, London, the Nationalgalerie of Berlin, the Kunsteverein of Hamburg, the Documenta VII of Kassel, the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, the Centro Atlántico of Canarias, etc.

Ray, Man. Philadelphia (USA), 1890 - Paris (France), 1976. A tireless experimenter with photographic techniques who participated in the Cubist, Dadaist, and Surrealist art movements, Man Ray created a new photographic art which emphasized chance effects and surprising juxtapositions. Unconcerned with "Craft," he employed solarization, grain enlargement, and cameraless prints (photograms) which he called "Rayographs" - made by placing objects directly on photographic paper and exposing them to the light. Man Ray was, with Moholy-Nagy, the most significant maker of cameraless photographs in the 1920s and 1930s. As a painter, sculptor, and filmmaker, as well as a photographer, Man Ray brought his diverse techniques to bear upon one another in the attempt to create "disturbing objects. His life and art spoke of freedom, pleasure, and the desire for extended awareness and means of expression. Man Ray moved to Paris in 1921 where he made his living as a professional fashion and portrait photographer while pursuing more creative work on the side. He became internationally famous as the photographer of Parisian artists between the wars. He made portraits of the entire intellectual elite: Breton, Joyce, Eliot, Schoenberg, Matisse, Ernst, Brancusi, Artaud, Stein, and Hemingway, to name a few. Soon after his arrival in Paris, Ray made his first Rayograph. He participated in the first international Dada show held in Paris, was a member of the Surrealist movement from 1924, and exhibited at the first Surrealist show in Paris in 1925. In 1932, his work appeared in the major Surrealist exhibition at New York's Julien Levy Gallery. He was included in the Museum of Modern Art's Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism show in 1935.

Rennó, Rosangela. Belo Horizonte (Brasil), 1962. She lives and works in Río de Janeiro. She is a photographer, although, occasionally, her work has also been presented as installations. In her work, she pays special attention to surfaces. Regarding the subject of tattoos, she elaborated a series that has been present in several exhibitions during recent years, which portrayed tattoos made with very rudimentary techniques in prisons. Her work is characterized by passions, feelings and the way they are externalized onto surfaces, mainly onto the body itself. Among her most important exhibitions, most noteworthy are those held at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; II Biennial of Johannesburg, South Africa; InSite, San Diego/Tijuana; II Kwangju Biennale, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam; Centro Cultural Sao Paulo, Brasil; Instituto Brasileiro de Arte e Cultura, Río de Janeiro; MNCA Reina Sofía, Madrid; XXV Bienal de Sao Paulo; Aperto XLX Biennale di Venezia, 1993. Her work can be found in collections like those of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; MNCA Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo, Brasil; Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro and Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas. She is represented by the Galería Camargo Vilaça, of Sao Paulo, Brasil. 

Riefenstahl, Leni. Berlin (Germany), 1902. Dancer, actress, filmmaker and photographer. Her initial work as a dancer opened her the doors of film where she featured in La montaña sagrada (1926) by Arnold Franck, creator of the “mountain movie” genre and with whom she continues working in subsequent films. In 1932 she produces, writes and directs Das blaue licht. Feeling close to the political power that had just established itself in Germany she shoots a propagandistic short film Sieg des Glaubens (1933), followed by Tnumph des villens, 1935, a feature film devoted to the nazi meetings in Nuremberg. In 1936 she directs a film about the Olympic Games in Berlin, Los dioses del estadio. Between 1940 and 1954, after some years of having been barred to continue her work in Germany, she finished the shooting of  Tiefland. Many of her projects never came to be, as her submarine documentaries or her work about the nuba people in the heights of Sudan to which he devoted various photographic dossiers. Besides her memoirs or her photography books, her work and personality are portrayed in the book Five Lives edited by Taschen.

Rio Branco, Miguel. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), 1946. He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. An artist of many facets -he has been a painter, a press photographer, an installation artist, etc.-, he exhibits regularly in private galleries as well as museums and art centers in Europe, the United States and Brasil. His work is characterized by the treatment of the surface of the images and by the use of strong deep colors. This is a body of work that acquires its importance from photography but also from the publication of books and films, which convey the full vision of an observer of the world around him, of the most profound instants of life and of misery, of landscape of a civilization situated on the outskirts of nature and culture. He has work at the Centro Pompidou, in Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MEIAC, Badajoz; Museo de Fotografía de Curitiba, Brasil; Museo de Arte Moderno of Rio de Janeiro, among others. During the Biennial of Venice 2001, he is to have an exhibition at the Museo Peggy Guggenheim of Venice. He is represented in Spain by the Oliva Arauna gallery, in Madrid, and in Brasil by the Camargo Vilaça gallery, of Sao Paulo.

Rist, Pipilotti. Reinthal (Switzerland), 1962. He studies art, illustration and photography at the Academy of Vienna. His first artistic works are developed in the field of computers, design and digital art, to derive at present into video and video installations. In recent years, he has exhibited at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Musee des Beauz-Arts in Montreal, the Ludwig Museum of Cologne, Site in Santa Fe and the Nationalgalerie Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. He has received several prizes for his videos, such as the Feminale, from Cologne in 1988, the Viper de Lecerna, in 1989 and the 2000 prize of the Venice Biennial, in 1997.

Sabando, Teo. 1954. This is a conceptual artist who mainly works with performance and installation. Occasionally, photography forms a part of his installations and serves somehow to make permanent the ephemeral actions and interventions he carries out. In his work, he almost always mixes  symbolic, imaginary and conceptual elements, as well as the presence of the body -of the artist himself- and of writing. He has exhibited in the Palacio Provincial in Zaragoza, in the Museo de San Telmo in San Sebastian, in the Sala Rekalde of Bilbao, and in the galleries Altxerri in San Sebastian, Vanguardia in Bilbao, and Artefacto in Brussels. He has made many original books and his work can be found in numerous collections of Spanish public institutions.

Sánchez, Ricardo B. Caracas (Venezuela), 1953. This artist, who has been living in Madrid for some years now, has participated in Madrid’s ARCO art fair several times and has had shows in his native country, the United States, Germany and Spain. His photographic work features a constant investigation into the reality of appearance. He has developed numerous series on different subjects such as Identidades, Pases and series on flowers, gardens and New York landscapes. Though seemingly diverse, they all have the common denominator of this photographer’s unique gaze. In the year 2001, the publishers Polígrafa from Barcelona and Rizzoli from New York published his book Seduction, Deception, Illusion, and Truth.

Sanguinetti, Alessandra. Buenos Aires (Argentina), 1968. Since 1993 she has received fellowships from the National Arts Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Leonardo prize. She has had exhibitions in several cities of her country, as well as in Sweden and USA. Her work focuses on personal relationships and between these imaginary relationships and the reality of the countryside hard life, such as lived in Argentina. She has depicted animals, such as in her series El sexto día, and the life, dreams and confrontation with reality of two girls in Las aventuras de Guille y Beli.  Her work forms part of the collections of MoMA in New York and Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires.

Santamaría, Montserrat. Tarrasa, Barcelona (Spain). She lives and works in Madrid. In 1975, she joined the photography department at the periodical Cambio 16, where she stays until 1993. In 1985, she participates in the itinerant exhibit of World Photopress. In 1988, she is awarded the special prize of the competition Children in Focus. Later, she participates in the homage to Alberto Greco at the IVAM in Valencia. Among her exhibitions are Fotoperiodismo en libertad, Madrid and Portugal; Luz y tiempo de mujeres, Madrid and Mujeres, at the Fundación Arte y Tecnología, Madrid.

Santé, Luc. Author and compiler of the book “Evidence” (Farrar, Strausvand Giroux, New York, 1992), in which images of crimes committed in New York between 1914 and 1918 are gathered, dated and explained, in a literature at times poetic and always with a forensic exactitude. This book is a graphic sociological document of the highest quality, for it gives us an idea of what the city and its inhabitants were like at that moment and it situates us in the aesthetic of reality that film noir was later to generalise.

Sarfati, Lise. Algiers (Algeria), 1958. The artist, who is of  French nationality, at present lives and works in Paris. After graduating in Russian Language and Culture, she taught in private schools until 1986, when she started working as a professional photographer for the School of Fine Arts and several French newspapers. Between 1990 and 1995 she has worked for several news agencies and, at present, she is member of  Magnum. After the fall of the Berlin Wall she has spent most of her time in Russia. Besides the Fiacre prize in 1995, in 1996 she was awarded the Villa Medicis prize for her project Memory and Fight about Russian society. She has published her work in the New York Times Magazine and the Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung. She has also been awarded prizes such as the Visa d’Or Kodak in 1986 as well as the I.C.P. and the New York I.C.P. Infinity Award of Photojournalism in 1996.

Saudek, Jan. Prague (Czech Republic), 1933. With a very characteristic aesthetic, the work of Saudek has traversed all frontiers, turning his photographic repertoire into part of the most recognisable imagery of contemporary photography. His first works in black and white, his familiar images, nudes, allegories, portraits or scenes of adolescents, prostitutes, fat women, selfportraits, his conception of eroticism and sex, his anatomical exuberance, his perverse poetics, his half decadent half ruinous stages, as well as the dreamy treatment and excited colour, characterise a personal body of work that has served as inspiration for a multitude of book covers, posters and advertisements. His work can be found in numerous publications such as books or catalogues and it has been exhibited virtually all over the world.

Saura, Carlos. Huesca (Spain), 1932. Lives and works in Madrid. A film lover since youth, he abandoned his studies in industrial engineering and journalism to devote himself to photography and enter the Instituto de Investigaciones y Estudios Cinematográficos, where he becomes passionate about film technique and theory. It is in this institution that he will start teaching until 1963 when he is forced to leave for political reasons. He develops his movie career that had begun with the short film La tarde del domingo (1957) parallel to his photographic work. In 1958, he shoots Cuenca, a medium length film that, like his preceding essay and full-length film  Los Golfos (1959), tries to set the standard for a kind of Spanish new realism. Some of his most important films are La caza (1965); Peppermint Frappé (1967); Stress es tres, tres (1968); La Madriguera (1969); El jardín de las delicias (1970); Ana y los lobos (1972); La prima Angélica (1973); Cría Cuervos (1975), titles that inscribe themselves in the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and the transition to democracy. From his later work films like Mama cumple 100 años (1979); El Dorado (1987); La noche oscura (1989); ¡Ay Carmela! (1990) are worth noticing, as well as his films related to traditional Spanish dancing and music: Bodas de Sangre (1981), Carmen (1983), El amor brujo (1986) or Sevillanas (1995). His vast photographic work began in 1947, with the intention of recording the towns and people of Spain, an unfinished project due to his immersion into cinema. Nevertheless his dedication has been unwavering and his subject matter has widened in images that use different photographic formats. His work has been shown at the Círculo del Arte, Barcelona and Madrid, Instituto Cervantes de Munich and Roma, Galerie Manuspresse, Suttgart, an at KunstKöln 2000.

Seawright, Paul. Belfast (Ireland), 1965. He studies at the University of Ulster and later, at the Art and Design School of West Surrey, where he begins his work with photography. At present, he is chief at the Centre for Photographic Research of the University of Wales College in Newport. His work is profoundly linked to the social situation lived in Ireland, where violence has been present in the everyday life of its inhabitants for years. The way Seawright has of expressing this violence and fear, the danger floating in the air, is always peripheral, without showing it explicitly, by surrounding the subject; hence his most explicative or symbolic photos are suggestions, more literary than formal narrations. Death, disappearance, police, repression: all are subjects of his most famous series. He has exhibited, among other places, at the International Centre of Photography of New York, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and, in Spain, at the Centro de Fotografía of the University of Salamanca, in the year 2000.

Serrano, Andrés. New York (United States), 1950. After studying at the Modern Art School in Brooklyn, where he acquires a basic fine arts education, Serrano initiates a photographic career that will convert him, within a few years, into one of the most sought-after artists of his generation. His series “Fluids” and his images of religious figures submerged in urine (“Piss Christ”) provokes a scandal at the Whitney Biennial in 1987. Due to this incident, his name becomes a banner before the censorship of art at the hands of politicians. In his different series, Serrano, of Latin American origin and raised in the contradiction of saint worship and Catholicism, undertakes universal subjects such as death (“Morgue”) or sex, fear and power (“A history of sex”, “Klansmen”) or religion, but always from a radical and provocative perspective, which has attracted the close scrutiny  of censorship authorities on many occasions. On the other hand, his work incorporates quite classical aspects, regarding its composition as well as its genre, almost always portraitrature. He has exhibited virtually all over the world and especially noteworthy are the exhibits at the New Museum of New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal, the Seibu Museum of Tokyo, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the Documenta 8 of Kassel, and, in Spain, at the MEIAC, in Badajoz, in 1996.

Sherman, Cindy. New York (United States) 1954. Studied at Buffalo’s University College until 1979 when she started to make the black and white series that would come to be known as the Untitled Film Stills, recently acquired in its totality by the MOMA in New York.  That same year she had her first exhibition and since then her presence in collective shows around the world has become more than usual. Sherman represents through her photography the eighties decade as her work is based on representation and portraiture. Present in all her photographs as the only and ever-transforming character, Sherman has passed onto set-up photography, garbage landscapes and sex scenes that include dolls, protheses and all kinds of disguises. She has made one commercial film (The Office Killer) and several other independent film and video projects. Her work belongs in the most important public collections around the world and is, as of now, the living photographer who has gotten the highest bids in an art auction.

Sidibé, Malick. Mali, 1936. Born in a small village, he studied to be a goldsmith at the Ecole des Artisans Soudanais, Bamako. In 1956, he was initiated into the craft of photography as an apprentice at a Photo Service shop, later to open his own studio, the “Studio Malick” in 1962 in downtown Bamako. He began to leave the studio to do reportage, covering numerous festive occasions and social events celebrated by young people. Although highly site specific, these ethnographic portraits of dance parties capture the collective celebrative spirit inherent in all humanity. In 1994, this ‘party’ photography earned worldwide recognition at the Premières Recontres de la Photographie Aficaine in Bamako. At present, he is one of the most well known African photographers, having exhibited his work at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 1995; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1996; Fundació la Caixa, Barcelona 1998; Stadtmuseum München, 1998; MCA Chicago y Art Cologne, 1999; Kulturen der Welt Berlin, 2000, among others.

Sierra, Santiago. Madrid (Spain), 1966. He resides in Mexico, D.F. After graduating from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid with a degree in Fine Art, and studying at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, in Hamburg, he travels to Mexico in 1995 with a research grant from the Escuela de San Carlos, UNAM, in Mexio D.F. His works, mostly actions and performances, can be considered conceptual art dealing with socioeconomic problems and those related to the salary system. The use he makes of photography is conditioned by its documentary nature, as a register of the performances. He has exhibited at the MNCA Reina Sofía, Madrid; P.S.1, New York; Museo Rufino Tamayo, México D.F.; Museo Carrillo Gil, México D.F.; and at private spaces in several countries, such as the gallery Enrique Guerrero, Mexico D.F.; the gallery Angel Romero, Madrid; Ace Gallery, New York; Lisson Gallery, London.

Smith, Jack. Columbus, Ohio (United States), 1932 – New York, 1989. He studied dance and theater, he wrote and directed many on stage productions, among them Rehearsal for The Destruction of Atlantis (1965). He was an influent personality in the circle of the New York avant-garde raising to fame thanks to Flaming Creatures (1963), the polemic movie about the sexual behavior and fantasies of the people from show business that surrounded him. After Jonas Mekas arrest in 1964 for having shown the movie ina public theater, he started and important parenthesis in the fight against American censorship. Since his arrival in New York he starts trying out the dramatic in films like Buzzards Over Bagdag (1951-1956) that  remains unfinished as is most of his filmography (Scotch Tape, 1961; Normal Love, 1963; In The Grip of The Lobster, 1966; No President, 1968; Taboo of Farblonjet, 1969). He also becomes an actor under the direction of the most important underground directors of his time like Andy Warhol (Batman, Dracula, 1964), Ken Jacobs, Ron Rice and Gregory Markopoulos. His life and work were object of a retrospective shoe at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, en 1997-98.

Smith, Paul M. Bradford on Avon (United Kingdom), 1969. Having studied at Coventry University and the Royal College of Art until 1997, he had his first solo show at the Royal Photographic Society, Bath. Through his most well known series, Artists Rifles, Action, Robbie Williams and Make my Night, he explores and pokes fun at the dubious boundaries between fact and fiction in photography. His group (self) portraits of men at war or at play, feature the artist as sole protagonist, multiplied by digital technologies, thus taking on all the diverse roles of the crowd himself. In 1996, he won the John Klobal Portrait Award and his work forms part of the collections of the Denver Museum, the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds and The Saatchi Gallery, London. Among his solo shows, most noteworthy are Neurotic Realism, Saatchi Gallery, London, 1999; Complicity, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 2000, Make my night, Scott Nichols, San Francisco, 2000. In 2002, he will exhibit his new series at the Galería Espacio Mínimo, Madrid.

Sone, Yutaka. Shizuoka (Japan), 1965. At present, he lives and works in Tokio. He studied Fine Art at the Tokyo Geijutsu University until 1988, and architecture, at the same university, until 1992. His performances and video installations always deal with the dialectic confrontation between public and private, individual and city, exceptional and commonplace, using the fiction of the visual mediums and staging that approaches what is apparently real. With his series Birthday Party, he participated in the Sculpture Projects of Münster in 1997 and at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center de Long Island City, New York in the show Loop; among his most outstanding solo shows are those  held at the MOCA in Los Angeles, at the Hiroshima City Contemporary Art Museum and in private centers and galleries in Japan.

Sougez, Emmanuel. (Bordeaux 1889-Paris 1972). Although he studied Fine Arts in Bordeaux by 1911 Emmanuel Sougez decided to devote himself to photography. While living in Paris at the end of WWI, he started making portraits and cultural information. In 1926 he founded L’Illustration’s photographic service. He started to get noticed for his commercial compositions an still lives from the late twenties. He published Vu, D’Ací I d’Allà, Jazz, Gebrauchsgraphik and Querschnitt among others. He also made the photographic selection for the annual Photo-Graphie published by Arts et Métiers Graphiques (1930-3339). He was the head of the French photographic movement called Pure Photography, akin to the German New Objectivity and to the California group f/64. In 1936 he founded the group Le Rectangle that would get back together after WWII under the name Les XV amongst whose members one could count the young Doisneau. Besides illustrating various art books his most known work are the still lives and nudes. Some of his individual exhibitions include: La Pléiade, París 1935, Le Chasseur d’Images, París 1937, Frankfurter Kunsverein, Francfort 1982, Palais de Tokyo, París 1993, Canal de Isabel II, Madrid 1995,  Château d’Eau, Toulouse, 1997, Museo de Bellas Artes, Coruña 2000.

Starkey, Hannah. Belfast (Irlanda) 1971. The photographer who currently lives and works in London has shown her work in collective and individual exhibitions in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. Her work has been reviewed in such publications as Flash Art, Artforum, Art Monthly or Segno. Among other prizes in 1999 she was awarded the Excellence Prize at the 3rd. International Photography Biennale in Tokio. This year she has been commissioned a piece for Tate Modern Gallery in Londres.

Sterbak, Jana. Prague (Czech Republic), 1955. She lives and works in Montreal and in Paris. Sterbak emigrated with her family to Canada in 1968. There, at age 13, she found a new culture, a new language, another religion and another political system. Sterbak’s artwork, polyvalent and ambiguous, recalls that childhood experience. It is informed by an appreciation of the absurd and of the dark humor rooted in her memories of Prague, in medieval myths, traditional stories and the literature of Franz Kafka, Karel Capek and Hasek. Jana Sterbek uses a variety of different materials, chosen according to the requirements of each piece. Indistinctly, she makes sculptures, installations or photographs. For the last five years, Sterbak’s work has been included in solo shows in the Musée d’art Moderne in Saint-Etienne; the Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Museum of Modern Art, Humlenbaek, Denmark; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. An important itinerant retrospective show of her work is being prepared at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Stewart, Christopher. London (Great Britain), 1966. Educated at the Royal College of Art in London, his work fits into the new current of British photographers who are settling into the international scene with photographs characterised by a pervading theatrical nature, which represent and symbolise scenes pretended as real. The shadow of the document is lurking in these photographs that are rife with the idea of reality. Specifically, Stewart’s work is closely linked to situations of power, violence and physical and psychological pressure. His personal memory is burdened by his childhood experiences in a working class neighbourhood and those related to his father’s work as a policeman. His most well-known series is “Insecurity”, which deals with the training of security forces and scenes of underlying violence, never shown in their decisive moments, but only elliptically. His work has been shown at the Palacio de Abrantes in Salamanca, as part of Imago 2000 and in various British galleries and institutions as well as international art fairs.

Streuli, Beat. Altdorf (Switzerland), 1957. His images of youngsters of all nationalities, their lifes and daily attitudes, are well-known on an international basis. His large format and show of group and individual portraits of teenagers of cities such as Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Bristol, etc have become icons of the image of  present-day youth. One of the photographer’s  goals is to search for the identity of individuals among the urban crowd, as well as a snap-shot quality. Among his abundant exhibitions it is worth mentioning the following: Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, MACBA in Barcelona, Kunsteverain and Portikus in Frankfurt, and the Deichtorhalle of Hamburg.

Sugimoto, Hiroshi. Tokyo (Japan), 1948. After studying sociology and political science at the University of Tokyo, and photography and fine art at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, California, he moves to New York in 1974, where he currently lives and works. His entire body of photographic work, always in black and white and consisting of ample series developed over the course of several years, revolve around the passage of time, restoring a time and a place that was once another, that already happened and of which his images represent a memory, a portrait of a story. Thus occurs with his “Dioramas”, in which he photographs wild animals reconstructed in natural history museums, or in “Wax Museums”. The flux of time, immobile in one single image, as in his “Seascapes” or his “Theaters” or “Drive-ins”, is set forth like a silent dialogue between what remains unaltered and what evolves. He has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries; most noteworthy in recent years are the shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kunsthalle in Basel, the Moderna Museet of Stockholm, the XXV Biennial of Sao Paulo, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the MOCA in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim of New York. In Spain, it was possible to see an extensive selection of his work in 1998 at “la Caixa” Foundation exhibition spaces.

Taylor-Wood, Sam. London (United Kingdom), 1967. The artists first works revolved around the sculptural medium, later her work developed on other supports like video and photography where the narrative plays a central role. Unhappiness, solitude, extatic joy and violence in feelings and in sexuality are some of the recurrent subjects of her work. In 1997 she was awarded with the Young Artist Prize and the Venezia Biennale. Her work has been shown in some of the most important museums around the world. Her last individual exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York confirmed her as one of the most important young artists today.

Thiel, Katherine Du. After earning a degree in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute, Katherine Du Thiel acts as visiting professor at that same center. In her photographs, focused on the body and the anatomy of human beings, the internal structure of the body emerges toward the exterior, like projections upon the surface of the selected parts. In keeping with this interest in anatomical dissection, her latest works revolve around a sort of fragmented self-portraits. Her work has appeared on Public Affairs Televison as well as in Parenting Magazine and See Magazine, and it has been exhibited in San Francisco Nudes, Seibundoshinkosha, 1995. She is represented by Morphos Gallery, San Francisco.

Thurston Thompson, Charles. (1816-1868). British photographer. He made colotype and collodium based images on the subjects of architecture, art and protrait.He started working as an engraver and soon discovered photography (ca.1848) to be an ideal technique akin to his interests. He worked for the Art and Sciences Department and was commissioned several works in Paris (the Louvre and the Universal Exhibition of 1855). He came on to be head photographer of the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) in 1859. The Museum sent him to Spain and Portugal (1866-7) to make a series of images in Santago de Compostela and other Portuguese cities. His photographs are currently kept at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Tillmans, Wolfgang. Remscheid (Germany), 1968. The artist studied in Great Britain and at present lives and works in London. Since the mid-1990s Tillmans’ work, originally conceived for the world of design, advertisement and fashion photography, acquired a power that has turn the photographer into a paradigmatic reference of the world of youth.  His work, with no prejudice and very close to the world of advertisement, has been exhibited in museums and private galleries such as the following: Portikus in Frankfurt; Kunsthalle of Zurich; Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and Deichtorhalle of Hamburg. In the year 2000 Wolfgang Tillmans was awarded the prestigious Turner prize in Great Britain.

Tisdale, Danny. (United States), 1958. His work, as an artist, teacher and writer alike, is intimately linked to the civil rights movement, and especially to the defence of equality and the culture of the Afro-American population. He has exhibited in numerous group shows related to the image of black culture, presenting the image of its most outstanding contemporary protagonists, such as Malcom X, Buster Douglas, Rodney King..., and of its icons and symbols, always in photographic series, as in “Twentieth Century Men”, which issue from the document to go a step further by way of the subjectivity of the themes. He has worked in the pedagogical departments of the New Museum of New York and the Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles, among others. Amongst the museums and public exhibition spaces in which he has exhibited, most noteworthy are the New Museum of New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Californian African Museum in California and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

Tomic, Milica. Belgrade (Yugoslavia), 1960. She studies at the Academy of Fine Art of Belgrade, the city in which she resides at present. Her work centres on memory and oblivion and the limits  people can reach in their personal experiences. Violence, as a commonplace memory of a recent war, is present in the most minimal gestures of her work. She has exhibited recently in the Kunsthalle of Vienna, at the Moderna Museet of Stockholm, the XXIV Biennial of Sao Paulo and the Museum of Modern Art Stiftung of Vienna.

Torre, Milagros de la. Lima (Peru), 1965. At present, she lives and works in Mexico, D.F. She studied photography at the London College of Printing. Her work, essentially photographic, deals with people and their relationships, more or less dramatic or commonplace, parting from objects and documents with which they have been involved and which testify to that existence. She has exhibited at the National Centre of Photography in Paris; the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo of San José, Costa Rica; the Palais of Tokyo, Paris; in the Museo de Arte Moderno of Oaxaca, Mexico; at the Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico D.F.; at the Museo del Barrio, New York; at “la Caixa” Foundation, Barcelona; at the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego; at the II Biennial of Johannesburg, South Africa; at the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston; at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, etc. In Spain, she exhibits regularly at the Luis Adelantado Gallery, in Valencia. She has work at the Centro Nacional Reina Sofía, Madrid, at the Centro de la Fotografía of the University of Salamanca, at the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico, D.F. and at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes of Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as in other public collections.

Trillo, Miguel. Jimena, Cádiz (Spain), 1953. Miguel Trillo lives and works in Barcelona since 1994. He holds a degree in Media Arts and Spanish Language and Literature. Since the 1970s he has depicted teenagers in rock concerts, discos… At the beginning these youngsters who modeled for him belonged to his family circle and to his group of friends of Málaga and Sevilla. In the 1980s the photographer moved to Madrid to depict anonymous characters of the “movida madrileña”, a phenomenon which could be described as the awakening of a group of artists living in Madrid to modern culture. These photographs were exhibited in Galería Ovidio (1982), Sala Amadís (1983); they were also published in six issues of Rockocó (1981-1985). Miguel Trillo has published his photographs in magazines such as Sur Express, Madrid Hip Hop and the Sunday supplement of El País. The photographer has also exhibited in galleries such as Moriarty in Madrid, and El Manantial and H2O in Barcelona. His work can be defined as a combination of a document of a certain period, the catalogue of urban bands, and the passion for characters in continuous metamorphosis. His later work shows a tendency towards a more individual encounter with adolescents in a more personal environment. These photographs seem to avoid a formal, cataloguing style. His work forms part of important public and state collections.

Trobat, Rafael. Córdoba (Spain), 1965. He lives and works in Madrid. At present, in addition to his freelance photography activity, he is Professor of Photography at the Fine Arts Department of the Compultense University of Madrid and at the Journalism Department of the International Univeristy of Segovia. He has carried out work for periodicals such as El País (Spain), Liberation (France) and Barricada (Nicaragua) and for companies such as Kodak (Germany) and Channel 4 (England). He won awards from the Caixa Foundation (Fotopres’99), the Banesto Foundation (1994) and World Press Photo (Masterclass 1996). He learned photography as assistant to Cristina García Rodero, with whom he has collaborated since 1990, the year he started a documentary project, still in progress, on the social evolution of Nicaragua since the end of the Sandinista revolution. His photographs have been exhibited in Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland, France, England, Switzerland and Nicaragua as well as in most Latin American countries, in addition to being published in many countries of the European and American continents.

Varejâo, Adriana. Rio de Janeiro (Brasil), 1964. She lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Varejao’s work springs from painting to gradually endeavor into other languages, such as  installation or photography. Her work has always centered on the treatment of the body as a surface where historical and cultural narration take place, and she ties this to the specific place and particular history of her country. The importance of skin, of tattoos -she has various works with tattooed skins, which are not related to photography-, persists in many of her works, as does the importance of the voyage, the crossing of cultures and narration as a form of communication. She has exhibited individually and collectively in Brasil, United States, England, Spain, Venezuela, Portugal, Japan and Mexico. Among her most noteworthy exhibitions are those held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, the participation in the XXV Bienal de Sao Paulo, the Bienal de Liverpool in 1999, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, in the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, the Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon and the Sprengel Museum of Hannover. She is represented by the Soledad Lorenzo gallery, Madrid and by the Camargo Vilaça, Sao Paulo.

Vertov, Dziga. Byalistok (Poland), 1896 – Moscú (URSS), 1954. His real name was Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman. After studying music and medicine he devotes his time to writing poetry and narrative. Attracted by Futurism, he takes on the name (in Ucranian it means"spinning top"). In 1918 he becomes chief editor of Kinonedelija (Cinema-Week, the first soviet journal devoted to film). He organizes the work of projectionists in the front during the civil war and is in charge of setting up their material. Between 1920 and 1922 he makes several military documentaries, he travels in the propaganda trains and directs the Goskino Kalendar, a filmed magazine (1923-1925). He founded and personally took part in the Kino-Pravda (1922-1925), a documentary newscast. From the manifests Us (1922) and Kinoki, (Movie-Eye, 1923) –this last one published in the communist futurist magazine LEF- emerge the  "kinoki" or addicts to the Movie-Eye (KinoGlaz), but Vertov will eventually have to give up this analytical and sociological cinema to turn to making movies on demand. He will however give them the treatment of a poet and form creator. After Sagaj, Sovet! (¡Ahead, Soviet!) and Sestaja cast'mira (The Sixth Part of the World), both from 1926, he breaks his relation with the Goskino, contrary to his stand on artistic documentary. In his studies about Ucrania (VUFKU) he will develop his most audacious productions: Odinnadcatyj (The Eleventh Year, 1927-28), The Man with the Camera (1929), Sinfonia Donbassa (1930). Vertov takes advantage of all the resources in the movies: editing, slow motion, speed motion, animation, multiple exposures, overprinting, collage, color changes, metric editing and sound counterpoint. Three chants to Lenin (1934), would be his last great production in a professional life that is disrupted by the lack of economic means and support in the middle of generalized incomprehension. He died of cancer 1954.

Viéitez, Virxilio. Soutelo de Montes, Pontevedra (Spain), 1930. He emigrated to Catalonia at age 18, where he learned the craft of photography he was later to carry out in his native land between 1955 and the late 1980s. His repertoire of black and white photographs were taken for ID cards, weddings, first communions, wakes and abundant portraits of individuals and groups meant for sending to emigrants residing in South America. In his photographs, the anthropological and social factors, as registers of a harsh era such as the post civil war in Spain, and in Galicia in particular, coexist with the visual autonomy and psychological poignancy of the portraits. His first exhibition was held in 1997, in his home town, thanks to the perseverance of his daughter Keta, dedicated to making copies from the negatives to disseminate her father’s photographic archive. Once this work was discovered, it was exhibited at the VII Photography Biennial in Vigo in 1998, and at the Agence Vu in Paris, as well as the Canal Isabel II in Madrid and the Patio de Escuelas, University of Salamanca and Explorafoto 2001, also in Salamanca.

Vitali, Massimo. Como (Italy), 1944. He was educated in Milan and later moved to London, where he studied photography at the London College of Printing. From 1964 to 1979, he worked as a freelance press photographer. He later became the director of photography for fiction and advertising films. In 1993, he began to work with large format cameras. His work focuses on timely portraits, massively attended festivals and modern recreation spots. His best known work is that carried out on different beaches throughout Italy and in discotheques and entertainment centers where young people party and dance. This work has been reproduced in the book Beach & Disco, published by Steidl in Germany in the year 2000. Vitali has exhibited individually in galleries and public centers in Italy, France and the U.S.A. and collectively as participant in Le Temps, Vite, at the Pompidou in Paris, 2000, among others.

Wall, Jeff. Vancouver (Canada), 1946. He is well-known as an artist, instructor and essayist. Furthermore, he has been considered one of the most characteristic artists of the end of the twentieth century. He has taught at several American universities, particularly at the California Institute of the Arts. At present, he teaches at the University of Vancouver. Since 1979 he has shown his artwork in the Documenta X in Kassel, Centro Reina Sofía of Madrid, Jeu de Paume of Paris, Boijmans van Beuningen of Rotterdam, among others. He has collaborated in specific projects with other artists such as Dan Graham (Children’s Pavilion 1989). He has written several books on his artwork and upon conceptual and modern art in general.

Warhol, Andy. Pittsburgh, 1928 - New York, 1987 (United States). By the name of Andrej Warhola, and of Polish origin, Andy Warhol is one of the landmarks of universal art. The diversity of his activities and creative media and the fluidity, richness and variety of his contents convert him into one of the innovators of contemporary art. After studying graphic design and industrial art, he commences a painting career, clearly influenced by advertising and illustration, and also by the images, the popular icons, offered up by everyday life. The pop movement is born. His incursions into experimental film making have been essential to this genre. The use of photography as a base for his series of engravings and in many works of different periods is another outstanding element of his work. The observation of American society leads him to carry out series about consumer products, car accidents, electric chairs and criminals wanted by the police, always treated with the ‘warhol’ style so characteristic of his productions. He himself became an object of these crimes he reflected in his work upon suffering an attack on his life, which left him seriously affected (photographed by Richard Avedon). Warhol was extremely prolific and his is a household name, as his work has been published in many books and exhibited throughout the world.

Waters, John. Baltimore (United States) 1947. He pursues part of his studies in a catholic school in Baltimore where he soon stands apart from the other boys of his class. Waters, influenced by gore movies and a fan of quality cinema from a young age, is considered the king of underground film. In 1972 he shoots Pink Flamingos with only 10.000 USD, a movie that would become a cult film for the fans of underground. It is also the movie that launched Divine’s career, a character that would continuously appear in his subsequent films.  Bad taste, provocation and ironic winks to the world of cinema, its actyor and genres are some of his trademarks. Among his most important Pecker (1998), Hairspray (1988) Mondo Trasho, Serial Mom  (1994) and Cecil B. Demented (2000).

Wearing, Gillian. Birmingham (United Kingdom), 1963. Graduated from Goldsmith College in 1990. The artist works essentially with photography and video. His work focuses on the fears, fantasies and secrets of ordinary people and how spectators react to his work. His photographs focus on the dialogue and participation of all sorts of people, while his aesthetic and style has been aligned with the group of young British artists assembled in the exhibition “Sensation”. Among his group and solo exhibitions at various museums and privately-run galleries, it is worth mentioning the Kunsthalle of Zurich. It is important to note that his work is on display at the Madrid branch of “la Caixa” Foundation and at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, CGAC  in Santiago de Compostela in the year 2001.

Weegee. Lemberg (Ukraine), 1899 - New York (United States), 1968. By the name of Arthur H. Fellig, he emigrates to the United States at the age of 7, along with his entire family. He quits school at 14 to help maintain his household. Since his beginnings as a street photographer, he works all sorts of jobs until finally, in 1918, he finds a job in a photographic studio. In 1935, he becomes a freelance photographer and centres all his work on the area of Manhattan and the central Police Headquarters. At this time, he initiates his most popular period, converting his photographs of delinquency, crime, accidents, police raids, arrests, etc., into the birth of a genre and the most successful moment of the body of photographic work by Weegee (the nickname he used to sign his work from the beginning). He managed to obtain a license to install a police radio in his own car, as well as a darkroom to facilitate the process. Of his methods, it is said that by reaching the scene of the crime before the police, he sometimes manipulated it so as to improve the shot. From this period, many film scripts arise, like “Naked City”. In later series, Weegee was to do portraiture of people from Hollywood and popular and collective scenes of American life. His photographs and his books are a classic product of contemporary photography, and his aesthetics one of the bases for film noir.

Wenders, Wim. Dusseldorf (Germany) 1945. He studies medicine and philosophy to later attend Film School in Munich. While studying he writes about movies and rock music. His theses was his first full length film: Summer in the City (1970). Later he makes an adaptation of Peter Handke’s novel Die angst des tormanns beim eilmeter  (1971). Music, travel and men’s relation to history are the subjects present in all his films, among which are worth noticing: the trilogy Alice in den Stadten (1973), Flasche Bewegung  (1975) and Im der lauf der zeit (1976), Der amerikanische freund (1977) in which he met Nicholas Ray and Ford Coppola thus beginning a stay in the United States. Afterwards he will shoot Hammet (1982) and in Portugal Der satnd der dinge  (1983). In 1984 he goes back to work in the United States and directs Sam Shepard’s screenplay Paris-Texas, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival becoming a trademark in independent filmmaking. In 1987 he shoots in Germany Der himmel uber Berlin which got him the prize for best director in Cannes. In 1991 he shoots in more than five countries Until the End of the World. Among his last films the documentary  Buenavista Social Club shot in La Habana in 1998 should be counted.

White, Charlie. U.S.A. Still a very young artist, Charlie White earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1995, and a Master of Fine Art from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California in 1998. His digitally manipulated series are  staged, contrived scenes of commonplace life and everyday people in ordinary surroundings, yet with an arresting and outstanding element of fantasy that shapes a tableaux of ultra modern allegories never lacking their not so subtle touches of humor. Between 1999 and 2001, he had solo exhibitions at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York and the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, California. In these few years he has also had several group exhibitions in reputed institutions and art spaces in the United States and abroad, including the P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York; Fundació la Caixa, Barcelona and the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario.

Woodman, Francesca. (Denver 1958-New York 1981). Francesca Woodman spent a lot of time during her life in Italy. After attending design courses in Rhode Island and Rome she moved to New York where she would spend the rest of her life.  Although she did not have many exhibitions her work always had an important presence in the collective shows where she was included in Italy and New York. In 1981 the book Some Distorted Interior Geometries by Francesca Woodman was published (Philadelphia, Synapse Press). After her death, her work was included in various shows like Issues of Identity: The Construction of the Self at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986, Memento Mori at the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City in 1987 and Vanishing Presence at the  Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1989. In Europe her work could be seen in important shows at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and at Tecla Sala in Barcelona.

Xu Bing. Chongquing (China), 1955. He grew up in Beijing. In 1975, because of the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to the countryside for two years. In 1977, he enrolled in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he studied engraving. In his work, by way of montage and installations, he explores problems of language, from its communicative facet to colonialist interrelations, and the formal attractiveness of Chinese pictograms. His work has been exhibited at the 45 Venice Biennial; MOMA, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Cocido y Crudo, MNCA Reina Sofia, Madrid; V&A, London; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki;  the Sidney Biennial; the Biennial of Kwangju, Corea; the Biennial if Johannesburg, South Africa; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA); National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; ICC, International Communications Center, Tokyo; P.S. 1, New York. Among his solo shows, most outstanding are those at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Fundación Joan Miró, Palma de Mallorca, Institute of Contemporary Art, ICA, London; Galeria Nacional, Prague; and the National Gallery of Beijing. In July 1999, he received the Prize for Genius from the MacArthur Foundation in recognition of his “originality, creativity, self-direction and capability of making an important contribution to society, particularly through graphic or calligraphic work”.

Zhang Huan. Yang, province of He Nan (China), 1965. He holds a Fine Arts degree from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. His work is developed around performances and actions in a line of action in which the body is the axis of all action, because it disappears under the ink and act of writing or because it is covered with other substances such as water, honey, etc. These performances are systematically photographed, so his work diverges into two directions: the performances themselves, and their photographic registers. He has exhibited his work at Cotthem Gallery, Barcelona; Biennale de Lyon 2000; Culturgest, Lisboa; Cinco continentes y una ciudad, México D.F., 1999; Museum Ludwig, Colonia; Biennale di Venecia, 1999; Asia Society, P.S.1, New York, 1998; The China National Art Gallery, Beijing, and, this year, in the Pilgrimage’s Museum, in Santiago de Compostela. His work is included in collections such as The Asia Museum of Fukuoka, Japan; University Art Museum, Berkeley, California; The Hra Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokio; MacArthur Foundation, Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Philip Morris Co., Nueva York, among others.

Zulueta, Iván. San Sebastián (Spain), 1943. Lives and works in Madrid, city to which he moved in 1960 to pursue his studies in interior decoration at the Centro de Nuevas Profesiones. In 1964 he travels to New York where he attends several classes in painting and advertising drawing at Ad Students League. Upon his return to Madrid he enters the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía but is unable to finish. He works making all kinds of graphic work, design and posters for movies and starts shooting short films like Masaje; Frank Stain; Te veo; Marilyn; Leo es pardo, y A Mal Gam A. Among his full-length films Un, dos, tres, al escondite inglés (1969) and Arrebato (1980) are worth mentioning. This last one –now a cult movie in Spanish cinema- deals with the psychological relationship between the individual, the cinematographic media and the fatal triangle completed by sight, image and the act of filming. During the eighties he collaborates in television productions but stays away from the camera until 1999 when he goes back to poster design and photography and develops his well known work with Polaroid images.