Selections from PHotoEspaña 2011

PHotoEspaña runs through July 24, work is displayed in the cities of of Madrid, Cuenca, and Alcalá de Henares and Lisbon, Portugal

By Jack Crager | Published Jul 19, 2011 1:54 AM EDT

Ron Galella's shot of Sophia Loren attending a premiere party for Dr. Zhivago in New York City. "What matters is the emotion in the face," says Galella, whose flagship exhibition at PHotoEspaña 2011 — in Madrid's Circulo de Bellas Artes and the Loewe store — is titled Paparazzo Extraordinaire!. © Ron Galella

This untitled self-portrait of Cindy Sherman actually looks a bit like the artist — unlike many of her cleverly disguised depictions of bus riders, murder mystery suspects, and film-still subjects from her brilliant early work in the 1970s. Many of her gems from this period are on view in 1,000 Faces / 0 Faces / 1 Face, at Madrid’s Alcalá 31 as part of PHotoEspaña 2011. *© Cindy Sherman / SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Vienna*

Shilpa Gupta’s large-scale untitled portraits are among the most provocative images in Face Contact, the lynchpin exhibition at PHotoEspaña 2011, at Madrid’s Teatro Fernán Gómez. The show surveys the work of 31 artists who are pushing the boundaries of portraiture as a means of communication and social identification. *© Shilpa Gupta*

New York Photographer Dulce Pinzón’s series The Real Story of the Superheroes depicts Mexican immigrants to the United States who send money home to their families. This is her portrait of Noé Reyes of the state of Puebla, who works as a delivery boy in Brooklyn and sends home $500 a week. Pinzón’s work is part of the Face Contact exhibition at PHotoEspaña 2011. *© Dulce Pinzón*

One unusual component of PHotoEspaña 2011 is a series of painted portraits preserved with Egyptian mummies and dated between the first and third centuries B.C., including this picture of a priest. Curator Gerardo Mosquera calls this series “the very first passport photos,” as their purpose was to capture the subjects’ visages before they departed for the afterlife. The show, Fayum Portraits, is at Madrid’s National Archeology Museum. *© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved*

A video series called Beautiful Agony brings the Face Contact exhibition at PHotoEspaña 2011 to a rousing, er, climax. It features a round-robin screen display of clips from the website beautifulagony.com, in which participants send in videos of their own auto-erotic orgasms — all shot only from the shoulders up. The results are, in curator Gerardo Mosquiera’s words, “not explicit but highly erotic,” and further proof of the many vicissitudes of the art of portraiture. *Cortesía / Courtesy: beautifulagony.com*

Jack Crager

Jack Crager is a New York–based freelance writer and editor. He has covered photography and related subjects for more than two decades, as contributing editor to PopPhoto and as managing editor of AmericanPHOTO.