Emiliano Valdes

The recent re-discovery of Julio Zadik’s archive has yielded in a reconsideration of the origins of modern photography in Guatemala and its development through the nineteen forties, fifties and sixties. The exhibition and book that resulted from the Zadik family’s incursion into the great and impeccably kept legacy of their relative are filling in a gap in the construction not only of a recent history of photography but also in the construction of the identity of the country. In fact, it is in Zadik’s early images that we perceive a shift in the appreciation of the land and its people: a turning away from the ethnographic approach that prevailed during the late 19^th century in favour of a more equalitarian, more modern view of the “other” as the exhibition's co-curator, Valia Garzón, explains in the catalogue essay. 

PHotoEspaña, by now one of the important photography festivals in Central Europe is going Latin American. After 10 years, the event that began in Madrid as a group of local exhibits on contemporary photography has increasingly become a platform for the diffusion of the still image in the Old Continent. Until now.

Descubrimientos, a parallel program dedicated to young photographers in which the participants who apply will have the chance to have their portfolio reviewed by photography professionals from around the world and engage in dialogue with them, is now, for the first time, also holding Visionados [critique sessions] in Lima, Peru and Mexico City. In addition, the program involves a competition –Premio Descubrimientos PHE Epson – whose prize consists of a solo exhibition in the following edition of the festival in Madrid, Spain.