Cristina De Middel is a photographer whose work investigates photography’s
ambiguous relationship to truth. Blending documentary and conceptual
photographic practices, she plays with reconstructions and archetypes in order to
build a more layered understanding of the subject she approaches.
From the premise that the description of the world provided by mass media is
reducing the real understanding of the world we live in, her selection of subjects
responds to the urgency of completing the portrait or re-launching the debate taking
the potential of photography as the raw material for her story-telling.
After a 10 year career as a photojournalist, Cristina stepped outside of the straight
documentary gaze and produced the acclaimed series “The Afronauts” (2012),
which explored the history of a failed space program in Zambia in the 1960s through
staged reenactments of obscure narratives that challenged the traditional depiction
of the African continent.
De Middel continuously produces new bodies of work. The series This is what hatred
did (2014), Sharkification (2015) and Jan Mayen (2015), to name a few examples
were all published as books in 2015.
De Middel’s work has received numerous awards in both the editorial and the artistic
field, including PhotoFolio Arles 2012, Finalist of the Deutsche Börse Prize, and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York.
Cristina became a Magnum nominee in 2017, an associate in 2019, and a member in 2022.