Selections from PHotoEspaña 2011

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.