“Librets de Festes” is the first joint exhibition of the three Spanish photographers who are part of the Magnum agency, undoubtedly the most prestigious in the world, and which will be presented at the Ponce+Robles Gallery during the new edition of the PhotoEspaña Off Festival, an event always eagerly awaited by lovers of art and photography.

“Llibrets de Festes” is the result of a project carried out in the Valencian Community in 2023 by Cristina García Rodero, Cristina de Middel and Lua Ribeira, who are called to work together for the first time.

The project aims to address the spring festivals of the Valencian Community from different perspectives and had a first phase in Castellón at the end of March 2023. There, at the Casa de Caragols under the name Magnum Live Lab, the authors shared with the public the process of editing their works in open sessions.

Each of the photographers freely approached her journey. Cristina García Rodero (1949, Ciudad Real), worked in different places in the community, approaching Los Enfarinats in Alicante, the Castellets in Castellón and the Fallas in Valencia, as part of her journey in the construction of that great anthropological and social portrait of our country that she began in the mid-seventies. Cristina de Middel (1975, Alicante), who was born and raised in the region, approached the Fallas in Valencia always looking for a parallel narrative to the one officially shown to us by the media about this festivity, to do so she makes use of a certain irony in the achievement of images and scenes that manage to broaden the vision of those days. Finally, Lua Ribeira (1986, Galicia) approaches the festivities from a distance and with the freshness of not having experienced them before and focuses her lens on the peripheries, both physical and temporal, of the same. The outskirts of the cities, with their orchards touching the large blocks of buildings, are the scene where in the early hours of the morning many of the young people who have been living the festivities appear. It is a portrait of a generation that wanders between a new world and another inherited one that it is forced to assume.

As an essential part of the project, the publishing houses This Book is True and Los Doscientos have produced a special publication, which is a box with three Llibrets de Festes with each of the authors' works and three portfolios with ten original works inside each of them. This is a special edition of only two hundred copies for sale that aims to bring the work of these authors closer to a new collector's market.

This project has been curated by Rafael Doctor Roncero and has the collaboration of FUJIFILMS and Magnum Photos.