The gaze that decides. An interview with Elisa Medde

The appointment of Massimiliano Gioni as director of the New Museum in New York has once again drawn attention to Italians at the helm of major cultural institutions abroad. Just like in the deck of playing cards featuring the faces of the most wanted, distributed by the US army during the invasion of Iraq, Gioni is the Ace of Spades. The Queen of Hearts works in France, the King of Diamonds in Germany, the Jack of Clubs in Switzerland. They are the fugitives of Italian culture, and like fugitives, they survive as long as they remain outside the system. Those who return are captured by the system and left to die amidst bureaucracy and political feuds.

But one card remained at the bottom of the pack: the one bearing the image of Elisa Medde, who has been director of the Foto Colectania Foundation in Barcelona for less than a year. She is the only Italian to head a photography institution abroad. Born in Nuoro, with a degree in Art History from La Sapienza University, she moved to Amsterdam, first as editor-in-chief and then as director of Foam Magazine, which under her leadership became Europe’s coolest magazine, winning the Lucie Award for Best Photography Magazine twice, in 2017 and 2019. In 2023, the year she left the magazine, the Royal Photographic Society in London – the oldest institution in the sector still in operation – awarded her the prize for photographic publishing.

This oversight is hardly surprising in a society where everyone has a camera in their pocket, but those working in photography enjoy about as much popularity as a curling player (though, come to think of it, the same goes for poets: who can name five contemporary Italian poets?). So it’s hardly surprising that the name Foto Colectania rings no bells. Yet it is one of the most vibrant organisations in this field, not just in Spain. Tracing Medde’s career helps us understand not only what has happened in the culture of the image over the past decade, but also where it is heading: who decides which photographs matter, and what happens when that decision is no longer made in London or New York.

“To understand what my role is here in Barcelona, you first need to understand what Foto Colectania is,” the director explains to Il Foglio. The institution has been in existence for twenty-five years and collects Spanish and Portuguese photography from 1950 to the present day. The date is no coincidence, and has a personal significance: the founder, Mario Rotllant, was born the following year, in 1951, as if he had wanted to begin the history of his country just before his own birth. But 1950 also marks the dawn of contemporary Spain: Franco was in power, but shortly afterwards the transition and the ‘movida’ would begin, first in Barcelona and then in Madrid: photographing those years means chronicling the transformation of a country. Rotllant is an industrialist, at the helm of Cobega, the family business behind the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler. Medde likens him to the visionaries of Olivetti. “An old-school business leader with a strong social conscience. He decided to set up a foundation, to which he donated his collection, to preserve, disseminate and promote photographic expression for the community.” He built up the collection together with Pepe Font de Mora, who will remain director until December 2025.

The way in which that collection is put together is its identity: not iconic pieces, but trajectories. Over 3,000 photographs by just over a hundred artists, acquired in complete sets and across multiple series over the course of a lifetime, spanning a vast range of formats: from artist’s prints to the most ephemeral and popular materials – fanzines, photocopies, and record covers by Miguel Trillo. Because the collection also tells the story of how the very life of images changes over time. “By collecting in this way, you follow a photographer’s career, and you see not only how their artistic vision develops over time, but also how the medium itself evolves. One of the initial aims was to support the sector – the photographers – and to create a system that would enable the community to move forward. And after twenty-five years, you find yourself with material that truly allows you to trace the visual history of a country – something you couldn’t do with individual pieces: you’d miss out on the chance to construct a journey, a continuous narrative.” This is the point at which the economic choice – forgoing the market value of a famous shot – becomes a philosophical choice. “Photography, especially since the 1950s, is a discourse, not a single word,” says Medde. “Having the entire series, the sequence, allows you to understand what discourse is being articulated, what is being discussed and in what way.”

Over the past twenty-five years, the institution has established itself: eight staff members, including the director, are responsible not only for the photography collection but also for the photobook collection – which numbers nearly 4,500 titles – the library open to the public, and an exhibition space that over the years has hosted both the rediscovery of Spanish artists virtually unknown outside the Pyrenees and international names – Sarah Moon, Mary Ellen Mark, Daido Moriyama, Carrie Mae Weems – and, in 2017, “Fenómeno Fotolibro”, the largest exhibition ever dedicated to the photobook in Europe, with Martin Parr and Erik Kessels among the curators. Every two or three years, an exhibition featuring the collection is organised; the next one, this autumn, will be curated by Florian Ebner, head of the photography department at the Centre Pompidou. Foto Colectania is not MAPFRE, the wealthy insurance foundation behind blockbuster exhibitions with venues in Barcelona and Madrid, nor does it have the financial backing of an organisation such as MAST or the Prada Foundation. “We are an independent non-profit organisation that isn’t backed by big money, but precisely for this reason we are much more agile and dynamic than a public institution, which operates according to different dynamics. We’re somewhere in between.” And the twenty-fifth anniversary stands as a turning point from which to try to glimpse the future: “My task is to try to envisage how an institution dedicated to photography in such a specific way can play a role over the next twenty-five years. And how a part of the history of European photography – specifically the Spanish and Portuguese traditions, so little known outside the official canon – might find its place on the international stage’. And, in this endeavour, Medde is called upon to contribute her own perspective: “One of my greatest interests is shifting the discourse on photography from ‘what it is’ to ‘what it does’, or what we want it to do, or what we make of it”.

But, as we were saying, before arriving in Barcelona, Medde worked at Foam for thirteen years. That’s not just a line on a CV. When she arrived, between 2010 and 2011, the Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam was the most dynamic institution in Europe in its field, and was on the verge of an explosion in popularity alongside the photobook phenomenon. Its slogan was a mini-manifesto: “Foam is not a museum, nor is it a magazine. Foam has a museum, Foam has a magazine”. The idea was that photography could be experienced across multiple platforms simultaneously – the museum in the local area, the fair, pop-ups around the city, even a radio programme, and a magazine that functioned as a portable, international institution. Its DNA, says Medde, was “to create a conversation that would bridge different ways of experiencing photography”: in the same issue, and at the same time, historic figures and emerging artists, well-known works and forgotten pieces.

Within that framework, Medde conceives the magazine as a collective exhibition on paper, curated issue by issue. Above all, she became the driving force behind Foam Talent Call, the programme that ultimately came to define her. It operated via an open call, in which participants had to submit not one but two portfolios, allowing the ‘solidity of their research’ to be assessed. Between 1,500 and 2,500 applicants would apply each year, from ninety countries; a maximum of twenty were selected. The selection process was internal, by design: not an external jury to hide behind, but a taking of responsibility. “This is what we see,” was the gist of it. Medde looked through every application each year, from the first to the last. Among many other ‘curling players’, Sara Cwynar, Silvia Rosi, Sohei Nishino, Lucas Foglia, Aaron Schuman, Davide Monteleone and Alejandro Cartagena passed through that school. “The competition didn’t build careers from scratch; rather, it acted as a multiplier, giving visibility to trajectories that would have been solid anyway.” Yet Talent, which brought her to prominence, wasn’t the job she cared about most. That honour went to the magazine’s themed issues, her true curatorial practice “on paper rather than on the wall”: each issue an idea, featuring established masters and newcomers in the same space. One of those issues, “Trip”, featuring Ricardo Cases on the cover, even ended up in a scene from Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It” – the protagonists on the sofa and, at the top of the pile of books on the coffee table, clearly visible, Foam Magazine.

His approach, in those years, became clearer. Firstly: to separate one’s own taste from what one thinks works. Secondly: not to be afraid of what one does not understand. Medde has a classical education, having studied art history in Rome, along with iconology and iconography – “extremely Eurocentric”, he remarks. Faced with a visual language entirely different from his own – photography of parts of the world for which he has no ‘eye’ – his reaction is not one of suspicion but of curiosity. Third: ask yourself whether and to what extent the person in front of you has something to say, and how they use the medium to say it. A great deal, she admits, “is gut instinct”: if an image lodges itself in the retina and keeps coming back for days, it means something. She cannot stand photographers’ statements: “I couldn’t care less” – an exaggeration, she admits straight away, but the point is that for her, the images come first. “I need the unease of images, their indeterminacy; I need to see something that doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable, but that moves me.” The context, the theory, the sociological framework behind a piece of work come later. First, there must be that impact. She likes to look at images with a “childlike spirit of discovery”: having no idea what they are, and being surprised by them precisely because of that.

This is the approach they were looking for in Barcelona, rather than a lavish directory of contacts. “It’s a way of looking at things. You can look in this way at a photograph from the other side of the planet or one taken on your own landing.” The point, for a foundation that has been collecting a century of Iberian photography, is that this perspective is exactly what is needed. The history of photography we have inherited, Medde observes, is “predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon and male”; the Mediterranean region, on both sides of the sea, has much more to offer and almost never brings it to the fore, whether from a historical or contemporary perspective. Spain is defined by just a few names – Ramón Masats, Joan Colom, Cristina García Rodero, and more recently Joan Fontcuberta or Cristina De Middel – but beneath that narrow canon lies a whole continent. Medde gives an example: Carlos Pérez Siquier, who photographed “in the style of Martin Parr before Martin Parr”, discovered by Parr himself during a visit to Barcelona. Or Virxilio Vieitez, a black-and-white photographer from the 1950s and 1960s with whom she herself ‘fell madly in love’ a few months ago, having been unaware of his existence until very recently: a photographer who at times recalls August Sander, at times Diane Arbus, yet is quintessentially Spanish, loved even by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had included him in his ‘imaginary museum’, the exhibition with which he inaugurated the foundation that bears his name. And not just men, nor just Spaniards. Alongside a rediscovered figure such as Pilar Aymerich – the photographer of the Transition and the Catalan feminist movements, celebrated at home yet almost unknown abroad – the collection features a fully established figure such as the Portuguese photographer Helena Almeida, whose work has been shown at the Venice Biennale and the Jeu de Paume.

Establishing these connections, bringing to light what the official canon has left out, is at the heart of Medde’s mission. The most delicate issue remains: the balance between the international and the local. Foto Colectania is deeply rooted in a particular territory, yet Medde arrives from the Netherlands knowing very little about it, and turns that ignorance into a resource: it allows her to view things “free from the prejudices of a national perspective”. And the territory, after all, is no longer what it was in 1950. “The demographics of the Mediterranean have changed profoundly over the last fifty years,” she explains, “and languages are more hybrid, stories more complex, and perspectives new. Paying attention to all these voices is another part of my role here.” In all this, the audience is not a given but a construct: it is educated in the same way as in Amsterdam, by bringing together in the same space the master and the newcomer, the well-known and the forgotten.

And how does Italy appear to someone who has spent years in the Netherlands and, now, in Spain? “Enormous progress has been made compared to twenty years ago. But I’d like to see institutions like Foto Colectania. We lack the concept of an institution halfway between a large public organisation and a small one – perhaps artist-run – dedicated to photography without being dependent on the political whims of the moment or the demands of entertainment. I’m convinced that the Barcelona model is one that can be replicated; it would be wonderful if organisations capable of the same international ambition, the same continuity and the same freedom were to emerge, establish themselves and endure over time here too.”