ARCHIVO CINETECA. Through June 30th. Hours: 5:00 pm to 9:00 pm. During the festival, also open in the mornings from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. Free admission. 

DocumentaMadrid: Posters by Rafael Jaramillo

On the occasion of its 15th anniversary, DocumentaMadrid is pulling back out the festival posters and a selection of photos from the catalogue taken by Rafael Jaramillo, who was in charge of the festival's visuals for its first nine years. Most of the photographs and posters in this exhibition could be seen in 2011 at the Cineteca Madrid during the Madriles exhibit, which featured the eight years of work done by Jaramillo for DocumentaMadrid.

The photographs and posters that Rafa Jaramillo did for DocumentaMadrid capture documentary film's calling of capturing reality in all its diversity, its richness, its ability to surprise us. At times, people and objects are found by chance, or a bird perches just where the lens happens to be pointing. At others, it is a highly-staged scene that helps to reveal facets of the day-to-day that, by being frozen forever in time, become a vestige of everyday life and, perhaps, surprise us when we look back at the photo with the passing of time. In many cases, it is neither one nor the other. It is enough to crop the field of vision a bit, choose one detail from out of all the stimuli we are bombarded with in the city, so that something we might not have noticed suddenly gets filled with meaning. Behind all these images, however, lies an intense, meticulous process spaced out over the time separating each edition of DocumentaMadrid.

Rafael Jaramillo gives shape to each new poster by moving throughout the city, looking at it from above, cross-wise or standing in front of the object being photographed. For a variety of reasons, though, from the camera angles and perspectives, the soul of the story's true lead character comes through: the city, Madrid.

Sonia García López