Cristina de Middel
Born in 1975 · Spain / Belgium
Questioning the stories that images make believable.
The story
After a period in photojournalism, Cristina de Middel shifted her practice towards projects combining documents, narrative and invention. The Afronauts draws on the history of a Zambian space programme to question stereotypes and the reader’s expectations. Books and sequences play an important role in her work. She thus examines how an image acquires an appearance of truth.
Understanding the work
Notice the transitions between document, object and constructed scene. Ask which visual expectations make a story plausible, and what the montage disrupts.
Key works and series
The Afronauts; Party; Journey to the Center.
