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In 2014, Foreign Policy Magazine singled out Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel as a "Leading Global Thinker." She currently has more than 20,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 10,000 people have "liked" her page on Facebook. Google turns up about 150,000 results (0.44 seconds) when you search for "Cristina de Middel" and about 37,800 results (0.43 seconds) when you add "Afronauts" to find her statistically most popular book, The Afronauts (2012). If you want to read an interview with her online-which I recommend doing, for she is refreshingly down to earth and speaks with uncommon clarity- you can choose from about 25,700 results. Having been invited by the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) to reflect on de Middel's prolific publishing practice in view of her participation in the VSW PhotoBookworks Symposium in June 2016,1 was faced with the question: What could I possibly add that wouldn't be an entirely pointless exercise in creating more of the same, however brilliantly written?
With this slightly unnerving prospect, I trawled interviews and articles online, hitting mostly on the "known knowns." Disappointed and also bored with the repetitive iconography of photojournalism, de Middel decided to employ the tools of fiction to convey a reality that felt closer to how the world manifests itself to us. Poly Spam (2014), de Middel's staged portraits of the shady characters promising astronomical amounts of money and relating largerthan-life stories of illness, death, and misfortune in email scams, is an early example of her fictional approach. It was by accident that she stumbled on the actual history on which The Afronauts was based. Sparsely documented, this history ignited her imagination to retell the tale of the short-lived Zambian space program from 1964, engendered by the euphoria over the country's newly gained independence. The book would jump-start her career, much to her own surprise, as she has expressed on numerous occasions.
Since 2012, de Middel has produced a steady trail of artist books: along with Poly Spam, there are Party. Quotationsfrom Chairman Mao TseTung (Quitonasto Form Chanmair Mao Tungest) (2014), Snap Fingers and Whistle (2013), Man Jayen/Jan Mayen (2015), Las piedras jamás (2015), This is what hatred did (2015), and most recently, Sharkification (2015), in which she imagines the favelas of Brazil as a coral reef...