Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Cristina De Middel is a Spanish conceptual photographer and works with documentary-driven recreations. What I love about De Middel is her approach to transform photojournalism in a new way. She tries to make people aware of certain historical stories but instead of creating it in a photojournalistic way she plays with fiction. The story "This is What Hatred Did" is based on a book from Amos Tutuola’s "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts". The book was published in 1954 and follows a young Nigerian boy who was forced to escape from his village, which has come under attack by soldiers. In her series "This is What Hatred Did", de Middel transposes Tutuola’s story to today’s world. When de Middel was reading Tutuola’s book, she was drawing sketches of how she would translate it into photographs. She used the story to recreate the reality and to describe Africa from a different perspective; one that doesn’t focus on wars, famines, and refugee camps. De Middel shot the whole series in Makoko, a slum in Lagos and one of the city’s most popular destinations among photojournalists. The photos she took in Makoko are strange in an intriguing way, almost comical, and colorfully folkloric. They reflect both the magical realist novel that is their inspiration and the Lagos neighborhood in which they are set. She injects an dreamlike energy into her images that raises them above the average. Each picture is a small story, an allegorical lesson, or an eye-opening tale of unexpected childlike weirdness, the everyday turned into the otherworldly by a fertile imagination. "I was a photojournalist for more than 10 years and I really liked this immediacy and strong link with reality that journalism has, but I got very disappointed with the repetitive language they use. I started then exploring new ways of saying the same and that is by using fiction. People engage with fiction in a complete different way and I believe this approach could bring some power back to photography when it comes to try and change the world." "A photojournalist should learn from artists, learn to tell stories differently, to educate the public and teach themselves to explain things better. Your responsibility is to make people understand what is actually happening. Using fables, myths and superstition to describe the world we live in is not exactly something that I invented…its been there since the beginning of time but we just fell, specially in photography, into an absurd spiral of trying to tell the “truth” that reduces dramatically the richness of most of the situations." – Cristina de Middel