Cristina De Middel

Cristina De Middel is a Spanish-Belgian photographer born in Alicante in 1975.

After studying Fine Arts, she moved away from the complexity of contemporary artistic language to turn her passion for photography into a passion for documenting the world in a straight way. She was a photojournalist working for Spanish local newspapers and NGOs like the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders for almost 10 years, covering crisis in Syria, Haiti and Bangladesh amongst others.

In 2012 she produced "The Afronauts", a fictional series inspired by the real, yet unbelievable project that Zambia had to conquer the moon in the middle of the Space Race and the Cold War. The project focused on the low expectations that the Western audience had towards the capacities of the African continent after decades of misrepresenting it and contributing to the stereotype with photography.

The book of " The Afronauts" series that she self-published consolidated her career and a language that questions the delicate and loaded relationship there is between photography and "truth". That same year she was awarded with the Infinity Award for the best publication at the International Center of Photography in New York, the PhotoFolio Review Award at the Rencontres d ́Arles, and she was a finalist of the prestigious Deutsche Börse Award for photography.

The series The Afronauts has now been exhibited more than 50 times in museums and Institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, The Hasselblad Foundation, the San Francisco MoMa, or the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Since 2012 Cristina has published more than 14 books and exhibited widely in the 5 continents. In 2017, she received the National Award for Photography in Spain and became part of Magnum Photos agency, which she is the president since 2022.

Cristina is also an active member of the photographic community and, apart from curating festivals like Lagos Photo (2015 and 2016), she is now a board member at the Deustche Börse Photography Foundation and at Vist Projects, a Pan-American platform that gives visibility to Latin American visual creators and explores the possibilities of the photographic language to diversify the points of view in the visual understanding we have of the world. She also has a publishing house (This Book is True) and she is continually promoting initiatives to support the potential of the photobook as a visual story-telling phenomenon.

Cristina is now based in Brazil and is continuously developing new projects.