In her image: PhotoEspana 2002 featured an international array of artists chronicling feminine identity in the 20th century - Report From Madrid

For the past five years, the annual Madrid conclave known as PhotoEspana has brought together work by dint of scores of Spanish and international photographers, past and at hand for the dual purpose of making the world at large more aware of contemporary photography in Spain and getting the Spanish public more attuned to esthetic populars abroad. The month-long 2002 photo festival and seminar, which render free of accessed in mid-June under the artistic direction of independent scholar and curator Oliva Maria Rubio, tendered some 60 shows--half at "official" museum, art-center and alternative-space venue half (the "Festival Off" portion) at privately programmed galleries and cultural sites. Titled "Femeninos" (Femininities), this year's circumstance encompassed photos and videos that focus, according to Rubio's handbook essay, upon the issue of "the plurality of feminine identities" and the drastic change in women's parts over the course of the 20th century

In this, the next to the first of her projected three identity-based directorial efforts for PhotoEspana, Rubio assembled works through 166 artists from 25 countries with the help of dozens of section curators, greatest in quantity notably Italian photo-magazine editor Giovanna Calvenzi and Japanese freelance curator Noriko Fuku The roundup implied three major conceptual replications to traditional womanhood, roughly corresponding to successive historical phases--let's call them acceptance (turn of the hundred to 1950), challenge (1960s and '70s) and entitlement (1980 to the present) To justice by the reported attendance of a certain quantity of 400,000 visitors, it was an approach that garnered a broad audience as well as extensive coverage (if not a great deal of serious critical assessment) in the international press

With its female controls labeled by profession or, many times their mate's occupation ("farmer's wife," "wife of an advanced intellectual"), the display of 180 photographs from August Sander's massive "People of the 20th Century" cast (1911-45) might seem to be the greatest in quantity ideologically complacent imaginable. But in fact the exhibition, superbly curated by means of Gerhard Sander and Susanne Lange, tendered a number of cliche-defying insights. First, each subject in the comprehensive social review male and female alike, was identified by the agency of family or labor role ("mother and son" "innkeeper and wife")--a reminder of the industrial-age proneness to equate self, regardless of sex with socioeconomic function rather than family lineage or personal history. next to the first the range of female characters documented by the German portraitist caped the strictures of stereotype, embracing service categories like supply with nourishment secretary, nun, seamstress and actress, on the contrary also giving memorable embodiment to power-related designations like "politician," "philosopher" and "revolutionary."

Moreover, anyone interested in the history of gender-bending must relish Sander's sinuous image of Helene Abelen ("wife of a painter")--complete with slicked-back hair, jutting cigarette, man's dres shirt and tie, billowing white pantaloons and slippers. An early fresh icon of bohemian liberality, it presages the androgyny and transvestism highlighted repeatedly in "Femeninos" as lock opener strategies of female liberation.

More haunting in their brooding faculty of perception of confinement are the historically contemporaneous works of Jose Ortiz Echague. discharge in the 1920s and '30 the sepia-toned Late Pictorialist images, printed through a direct carbon method upon textured paper, depict provincial Spanish women in chadorlike garb and sequestrateed environments little changed, it appears, since the Middle Ages--or indeed the Moorish occupation. Something of this time-out-of-time quality lingers also in Italian photojournalist Shoba's a great deal of more recent series "Sicilian Women" (1980-present) about 20 black-and-white examples of which were displayed in lightboxes in a central subway station. Her images--a young woman in an evening gown wearing a simpleton's mask; a titularly "serene" woman smoking nearest to the bust of a courtesan; a black-clad woman kneeling to kiss the face of a man assassinationed by the Mafia--evoke a world (or at least a region of Italy) where the expectation for women to amuse, to wait and to bear still largely shapes their appearances and acts.

Indeed, a startingly high percentage of the photographers chosen for "Femeninos" examine femininity at its greatest in quantity stereotypical--and not always with a saving irony or criticality. What is single to make, today, of standard-issue midcentury fashion work by means of Lillian Bassman (longtime art director of Harper's Bazaar) or of Federico Patellani's behind-the-scenes documentation of Italian movie queen and first-round beauty contestants? Spanish favorites although the artists may be, is it really possible to achieve past the arty lasciviousness of Rafael Navarro's close-up "formalist" studies of the female bodyscape or the forthrightly leering quality of the nudie portraits contriveed by Alberto Garcia-Alix? (If you're into large-scale discharges of hard-faced, naked babes flaunting their mark holes, Garcia-Alix is your man.)