Cristina De Middel

Cristina de Middel is a Spanish documentary photographer who investigates photography’s ambiguous relationship to truth. She is most famous for her 2012 series The Afronauts, about the short-lived Zambian space program in Southern Africa and for which she was nominated for the 2013 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

Blending documentary and conceptual photographic practices, she plays with reconstructions and archetypes in order to build a more layered understanding of the subjects she approaches. Working from the premise that mass media is reducing our real understanding of the world we live in, De Middel responds to an urgency to re-imagine tired aesthetic tropes and insert opinion in place of facts.

De Middel’s goal is to spark debate about representations of the truth through these staged images. Most recently, de Middel has used photography to explore community militarisation in Brazilian favelas, slums in Lagos, and Nigerian spam emails.

As well as her acclaimed personal projects, De Middel has worked on commission for clients including The Nobel Peace Foundation, Christian Dior, Vanity Fair USA, Vogue USA and FC Barcelona.