If an image is worth a thousand words, a photograph by Cristina García Rodero (Puertollano, 1949) can well be equated to decades of existence. Through her portraits, the Spanish photographer is able to capture the feeling of an entire town, the hidden emotion of a community or the exaltation of life in its maximum splendor. García Rodero has won practically everything in her professional field. The last award received from her was this same 2024, the Ortega y Gasset for her career. The jury highlighted “the valuable work of a pioneer and reference in documentary photography that she continues to be a teacher of photographers today. Cristina García Rodero tells what remains: traditions, folklore or customs in different places around the world. She has portrayed corners where no one had gone decades before the concept of emptied Spain appeared.
Previously, he had already received the National Prize for Photography in 1996, the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2005 and the Gold Medal for Merit at Work in 2014. Likewise, he is an honorary Doctor from the UCLM in 2018, among many other distinctions. The photojournalist has dedicated an extensive and successful career to investigating and portraying the rites, popular celebrations, and both religious and pagan traditions that were celebrated (or continue to be celebrated) in Spain. It should also be noted that García Rodero was the first person of Spanish nationality to join the Magnum Agency. She is a pioneering woman, a reference for an entire generation of photographers in our country.
‘Hidden Spain’ by Cristina García Rodero
Now it is reissued hidden Spain, a book that was published for the first time in 1989 by Lunwerg. And it is already the best seller on Amazon in the photography category. To create it, García Rodero traveled through Spanish towns for 15 years to capture in an image the face and spirit of a very unique context in Spain. A book that is already a milestone in the history of photography in this country. «I tried to photograph the mysterious, true and magical soul of popular Spain, with passion, love, humor, tenderness, rage and pain, with truth; the most intense and full of life moments of people as simple as they are irresistible, with all their inner strength, in a personal challenge that gave me strength and understanding and in which I put my heart,” says the photographer herself of a work that placed on the international scene.
Those who thought that the liturgies and celebrations so representative of Spain in recent centuries would disappear with the end of Franco’s dictatorship were wrong. Many of these rites continue today, some with great or slight modifications, but the impetus, the exaltation, the fervor continue. And this is attested to today by García Rodero herself, who continues her efforts to portray this other Spain, as reflected in Cristina García Rodero: The hidden looka film directed by Carlota Nelson that is available on Movistar Plus.
The black and white of the photographs that populate hidden Spain It never fails to impress today’s recipient, whether Spanish or not, because the primitiveness of the human being, his most internal passions, are reflected here. Life, death, ritual: the homo sapiens in all its glory. Thanks to the work of García Rodero, that hidden, strange Spain is more transparent and closer to us, although some photographs still make us stir inside, and the unfathomable mystery remains.
