Cristina De Middel (Alicante, 1975)

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 language to turn her passion for photography into a way of documenting the world directly. She worked as a photojournalist for nearly ten years, collaborating with local Spanish newspapers and NGOs such as the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, covering crises in Syria, Haiti, and Bangladesh, among other places.

In 2012, she created The Afronauts, a fictional series inspired by the unusual —yet real— project of Zambia to reach the Moon during the Space Race and within the context of the Cold War. The work reflected on the low expectations that Western audiences had regarding the capacities of the African continent, after decades of distorted representations that reinforced stereotypes through photography.

The photobook The Afronauts, which she self-published, consolidated her career and defined a personal language that questions the delicate and charged relationship between photography and “truth.” That same year, she received the Infinity Award for best publication from the International Center of Photography in New York, the PhotoFolio Review Award at the Rencontres d’Arles, and was a finalist for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Award.

Since then, The Afronauts has been exhibited more than fifty times in museums and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hasselblad Foundation, the San Francisco MoMA, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Since 2012, Cristina De Middel has published over fourteen books and has widely exhibited on five continents. In 2017, she received the National Photography Award in Spain and joined the Magnum Photos agency, of which she has been president since 2022.

In parallel, she has curated festivals such as Lagos Photo (2015 and 2016), serves on the board of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and Vist Projects, a Pan-American platform that gives visibility to Latin American visual creators and explores the possibilities of photography to diversify perspectives in how we visually understand the world.

She also runs the publishing house This Book is True and continually promotes initiatives to strengthen the photobook as a form of visual storytelling.

Cristina De Middel currently lives in Brazil and is still developing new projects.