Cristina García Rodero

Open-Mouthed

«Open-Mouthed» is the first thematic retrospective by Cristina García Rodero, covering her entire oeuvre from the first photographs in the late Seventies to her most recent shots. More than fifty images are showcased in the exhibition, specially selected for this project from an archive of over thirty thousand negatives. The majority of photographs are exhibited for the first time. Rodero has been nurturing the idea of this exhibition for more than forty years, with the intention that visitors find themselves ‘open-mouthed’ at the spectacle, like the protagonists of her images. The quantity of shots Rodero takes in the process of preparing her reportages is so vast that sooner or later numerous characters appear among the negatives — yawning, shouting, startled, rocking with laughter, convulsed by pain — in most of the situations where people open their mouths. This pervasive theme takes us through forty years of the photographer’s career, from her native town of Puertollano in Castilla-La Mancha to distant parts of the globe, forgotten and far from civilisation, or to present-day events like the Burning Man Festival in Nevada or the Love Parade in Germany.

We move from ethnographic subjects to the avant-garde. And all this without losing for a second her special and individual manner of telling us what’s happening in the world, so it stands to reason that Cristina García Rodero is the only Spanish member of the legendary Magnum Agency. The exhibition begins with shots of the birth of a child uttering his first cry at the start of life. Then we embark on an odyssey that passes through the kaleidoscope of feelings and emotions in the human personality, all ‘captured’ with that special understanding of truth and depth characteristic of the creative style of Cristina García Rodero, taking the last breath of our photographic journey at a funeral service in Georgia.

Juan Carlos Moya Zafra