España oculta

García Rodero (Puertollano, 1949), recipient of the National Photography Award in 1996, the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts in 2005, the Gold Medal for Merit in Work in 2014, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Castilla‑La Mancha in 2018, as well as the Ortega y Gasset Journalism Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2024, among many other distinctions, is an undisputed reference in contemporary photography.

Since the beginning of her career, she has traveled thousands of kilometers around the world in a constant search for human behavior. For fifteen years, she traveled through Spain’s villages with the aim of documenting and revealing their festivals, ceremonies, rituals, traditions, and ways of life. The result of this work was the photographic series gathered in España oculta (1989), a book that captured the face and spirit of a very special moment in the country’s history and became a landmark in Spanish photography: “I tried to photograph the mysterious, true, and magical soul of popular Spain—with passion, love, humor, tenderness, rage, and pain—with truth; the most intense and full‑of‑life moments of people as simple as they were irresistible, with all their inner strength, in a personal challenge that gave me strength and understanding, and into which I poured my heart.”