2012 Sony World Photography Awards - 2nd Place, Conceptual, Professional Competition
Cristina De Middel is a photographer whose work investigates photography’s ambiguous relationship to truth. Blending documentary and conceptual photographic practices, she plays with reconstructions and archetypes in order to build a more layered understanding of the subject she approaches. After a 10 year career as a photojournalist, Cristina stepped outside of the straight documentary gaze and produced the acclaimed series “The Afronauts” (2012), which explored the history of a failed space program in Zambia in the 1960s through staged reenactments of obscure narratives that challenged the traditional depiction of the African continent. De Middel continuously produces new bodies of work. The series This is what hatred did (2014), Sharkification (2015) and Jan Mayen (2015), to name a few examples were all published as books in 2015. In 2015 de Middel launched her own book-publishing house; This Book is True. This Book is True featuring both her own publications and supports publications of promising artists. In 2016 the second edition of The Afronauts was published. De Middel’s work has received numerous awards in both the editorial and the artistic field, including PhotoFolio Arles 2012, the Deutsche Börse Prize, and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York.