MADRID — PhotoEspaña launched its official opening in Madrid this month. By September, nearly 100 exhibitions will have showcased the work of more than 300 visual artists in Madrid and across Spain with the theme of reimagining.

Fundación Mapfre hosts an exhibition by Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena, which includes three series focusing on the U.S.-Mexico border: Invisible Line, Between Borders, and Los Americanos. Cartagena said, "It's potent, it shows its power all the time. Wherever you look, there's these jagged lines or these massive concrete walls that are cutting and showing that we are different. They are from the north, we are from the south and the cultures don't mix. There's this obsession with being separate, being two different cultures." He added, "One of the interesting or more poignant things of this experience was how the border, the wall, basically dissolves the idea of identity and personhood. And I'm iterating on the same idea. Who am I? Who are the people that live around me? Who are we as Mexicans? Who are we as Americans? And this physicality of the wall basically erases us and we become generic, we become no one."

Laia Abril has a solo show at the Museo del Romanticismo in Madrid, featuring seven life-size portraits exploring the effects of endometriosis. The subjects of these portraits include six women and one trans man. Abril said, "The idea was to visualise in real size. Their bodies in moments of pain, but also they were showing us what are the different positions they take when they try to have relief from that pain." She added, "It's kind of a fight between our body helping us to be resilient and fighting the pain, but also our body needs to be disconnected because it's carrying a lot of pain."

The Fernán Gómez center hosts Lux and Umbra, a retrospective of the work of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen, who spent her childhood in Kenya. Rafal Milach also has an exhibition at Circulo de Bellas Artes, featuring work from the Archive of Public Protests. This archive is a platform for photographs addressing social and political tensions in Poland and eastern Europe. Milach stated, "protest photography is quite boring visually, it always looks the same".

The group show Reimagining features 13 projects by photographers. These include Txema Salvans' series Wreckage of a Catastrophe and Jon Gorospe's exhibition The Grid, which uses video and audio to examine commuting environments and routines. Aleix Plademunt displays more than 120 black-and-white photographs in a series evoking a colonial gaze on rubber trees in the Peruvian rainforest. Eduardo Nave presents a series titled Espacio Disponible. Fundación Mapfre also hosts an exhibition titled Richard Avedon. In the American West, 1979-1984, for which Avedon used a team of assistants, a large format camera, and a backdrop for his portraits. Espacio Fundación Telefónica hosts an exhibition titled Robert Frank and The Americans, with Frank using a Leica 35mm camera for his work.