Cristina de Middel

Cristina de Middel (born 1975 in Alicante, Spain) is a photographer and artist whose work investigates photography's ambiguous relationship to truth. She studied photography at the University of Oklahoma, holds a degree in Fine Arts from Valencia and completed postgraduate studies in photojournalism in Barcelona. After a ten-year career as a photojournalist, she stepped outside the documentary gaze and created "The Afronauts" (2012), a self-published photobook that revisits the failed Zambian space programme of the 1960s through staged reconstructions. The project brought her international recognition, including a nomination for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in 2013. Her later series include "Party", "This Is What Hatred Did", "Sharkification", "Jan Mayen" and "Gentlemen's Club", a long-term project on the male clients of sex work. In 2015 she founded her own publishing house, This Book Is True. She has also produced several limited editions with Taller del Prado. A member of Magnum Photos, she has published more than a dozen books, has exhibited widely around the world, and lives and works between Spain, Mexico and Brazil.