MADRID.- Between June 5 and July 28, PHotoEspaña 2013, the XVI edition of the international festival of photography and visual arts, presents 74 exhibitions with works by 328 artists from 42 countries and an ample selection of public and professional activities. Lanzarote, Zaragoza and Prague are added to Madrid, Cuenca, Alcalá de Henares, and Alcobendas as venues of the festival.

In his last year as general curator of the festival, Gerardo Mosquera presents an exhibition program that revolves around the theme, "Body. Eros and Politics."

During a period marked by economic difficulties in the cultural sector, PHotoEspaña has sought new strategies to upkeep its program and its prestige. With a reduced budget and less public funding, PHotoEspaña maintains its nature as a collective project, finding support in partners that have made it possible to continue hosting one of the most important international photography events in Spain. Added to the support and commitment of the Fundación Banco Santander, the Fundación Telefónica, the Fundación ICO, Samsung and smart, the following public entities have also extended their support for the festival despite tough budgetary constraints: the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, the AECID, the Comunidad de Madrid, the ayuntamientos of Alcalá de Henares, Cuenca, Lanzarote and Zaragoza, and the European Community. The Cervantes Institute, the FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE, the Fundación Loewe and the city of Alcobendas, where the new International Photography Center PHotoEspaña will be opened, have also strengthened their presence in this edition of PHotoEspaña.

Given all these circumstances, 2013 constitutes a step forward in the projection of PHE. The festival has widened its range and extended its map more than ever, organizing exhibitions and activities in several Spanish cities and in Prague, which joins the rest of PHotoEspaña's international venues. This list will grow this autumn with the creation of PHotoEspaña.br, an exciting project that will be developed between October and December in São Paulo together with the Social Service of Commerce-SESC.

The Body Is a Battlefield
Gerardo Mosquera, general curator of PHE13, presents a series of exhibitions titled Body. Eros and Politics, which look at the diversity with which photography has approached one of its major themes: the human body.

It could be argued that photography emerged from a passion for sexuality, expressed in the nude. PHE13 delves this year into eroticism but it also explores the erotic vision without a body, directed towards the world around us. Conversely, it shows non-erotic photographic creation whose protagonist is the human body. Beyond that which is erotic, the body and images thereof have been instrumental in the fights for gender liberation and vindication, sexual orientation and the battle against discrimination. PHE will focus on these and other body politics as well as in the artistic practices in which the body is a cultural ground.

As well as operating as an instrument of subjective affirmation and individual and collective confrontation in culture and society, the body constructs itself. Photography has documented the aggressions against the body, and while on occasion it might have fed a morbid voyeurism, it has also played a crucial role in exposing and condemning violence on a global scale. All these subjects have been touched upon by the art included in the festival, which appropriates this highly relevant aphorism: "the body is a battlefield."

The themed program of PHE13 follows the paths developed over the past two years: looking at photography freely as the base of modern image making; decentralized and purposeful curatorship; access to wider audiences and diversification of cultural and geographic material, which includes a significant presence in Eastern Europe.

Body. Eros and Politics
Inscribed within this theme, the Círculo de Bellas Artes-Fundación Banco Santander will exhibit in the Goya hall He, She, It. Dialogues between Harry Callahan and Edward Weston, an approximation to nude photography from two great North American photographers through 80 photographs that evidence a vision filled with subjectivity and affection. In the Picasso hall will be displayed WOMAN. The Feminist Avant-Garde from the 1970s. Works from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Vienna, a collective exhibition by 21 artists who radically changed female iconography. The Minerva hall will host Your Steps Were Lost with the Landscape, the series with which Fernando Brito won the Descubrimientos PHE Award in 2011 and which presents photographs of dead bodies and crime scenes derived from the violence in which Mexico is presently subsumed.

The Juana Mordó hall at the Círculo de Bellas Artes will be home to the exhibition Body Structures, by Zbigniew Dłubak. Organized by the Polish Institute of Culture, it will uncover the modernist view of the female nude from one of the most influential names in Polish photography.

The exhibition Written on the Body, at the Espacio Fundación Telefónica, will bring together the aspects explored by Shirin Neshat's work in relation to the body, and will include recent works, such as the series she has produced using the classic Persian Book of Kings and the short OverRuled as starting points.

The Comunidad de Madrid organizes The Natural Darkness of Things, by Laura Torrado, at the Sala Canal de Isabel II. A retrospective of one of the most distinguished characters in contemporary Spanish art, the exhibition covers two decades of introspective and multidisciplinary work. Meanwhile, the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo will present, in harmony with the theme of PHE13, Colección VII, a part of its collection focused on images-photos, videos and other formats-of the body.

Thanks to the Czech Center, the work of Czech photographer František Drtikol will be on display at the National Engraving hall of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Photographs that evidence the shift in tendencies from pictorialism to modern photography through nude photography with symbolist and avant-garde perspectives.

At the Royal Botanical Garden-CSIC the work of Robert Doisneau, Barbara Kruger and Taryn Simon will be grouped in the collective exhibition Knowledge Is Power. A show organized by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques of the French Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication and the French Embassy in Spain which looks at the body as an ideological object. The same venue will also host the exhibition The Body Revealed in the Colección Alcobendas, with selected works focused on the theme of PHE13.

Self-portraits, by Violeta Bubelytė, organized by the Association of Lithuanian Photographer and the Lithuanian Embassy, will be on display at the Museo Nacional del Romanticismo. A selection of crude, melancholy and introspective images from one of the most prominent Lithuanian photographers of her generation.

The Fundación Lázaro Galdiano will be the setting for Taxonomy of Chaos, a reconstruction of the particular cabinet of the Rafael Doctor collection focused on the representation of the human body. Rafael Doctor will be there, personally attending to the visits for the duration of the exhibition.

Casa de América will showcase a portion of the project Hierarchies of Intimacy, carried out between 2002 and 2007 by Luis González Palma and Graciela de Oliveira. The exhibition, titled Your/My Pleasure, reflects about the roles and connections between the individual bodies that form the family.

FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE joins the Official Section of PHotoEspaña with the most comprehensive exhibition about North American photographer Emmet Gowin organized to date. The photographs of his family will be on display together with previously unpublished material and aerial photographs taken in Spain and commissioned by the foundation

Seven guest projects in the Official Section of PHE13
Beyond its theme, PHotoEspaña welcomes exhibition projects such as the one organized and hosted by Loewe in its shop in the calle Serrano: Mark Shaw's The Kennedys. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of John Fitzgerald Kennedy's death, the exhibition features the most intimate and iconic images of the president and his family, taken by his "unofficial" photographer.

The Museo ICO will present the work of Manolo Laguillo with the exhibition Reason and the City, a show that commemorates his thirty-five-year career and that looks at his work through a series of themed cycles that reveal the primary argumentative lines of his production.

Tabacalera. Espacio Promoción del Arte makes its debut as a PHE venue with (Re)presentaciones. Latin American Contemporary Photography, which brings together the work of 14 Latin American emerging photographers whose work focuses on the concept of representation.

The Comunidad de Madrid exhibits in the Sala Alcalá 31 The Spirit of the Age, approximately 60 pieces including photographs, sculptures, paintings and audiovisual material by Darren Almond, part of the Young British Artist generation.

Rafael Sanz Lobato. Photographs 1960-2008 is the exhibition by the 2011 National Photography Prize winner which will be hosted by the Royal Academy of San Fernando. This exhibit will showcase the work of a documentary photographer who has captured the character and the idiosyncrasy of Spanish towns.

Finally, and corresponding with the closing date of PHE13, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía will exhibit Tableau Vivant, by Azucena Vieites. In this show the artist delves into the ways of childhood, reflecting on experience and representation.

PHotoEspaña in Alcalá de Henares, Alcobendas, Cuenca, Prague and Zaragoza
La Lonja de Zaragoza will host Ricard Terré. Masterworks, a retrospective of 125 photographs that unveil one of the most modern visions in Spanish photography, with a personal technique marked by bold framings and high contrasts.

The city of Prague has joined PHE's program with two exhibitions. The Cervantes Institute in Prague welcomes the exhibition Leopoldo Pomés and Carlos Saura: Portraits as part of the program of PHE Itinera, which will later be taken to Berlin and Paris. Meanwhile, the Czech Center is home to the series The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey, by the Israeli photographer Yaakov Israel, winner of the Descubrimientos PHotoEspaña 2012 Award. This exhibition will then travel to the Centro de Arte Alcobendas, where it will be on display from June 20 to July 27.

Cuenca is once again part of PHE with two exhibitions. The Fundación Antonio Saura. Casa Zavala will host the work of Colombian photographer Nereo López, who depicted his country with a style halfway between visual poetry and photographic essay; and the exhibition The National Photography Prize Winners in the Colección Alcobendas, a selection of the work by photographers who have earned the National Photography Prize, awarded yearly by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport.

The former Hospital de Santa María la Rica in Alcalá de Henares presently hosts the exhibition The Best Photography Books of the Year, a selection of 90 international books specialized in photography and published over the past year.