Cristina García Rodero and her warm look towards women

Cristina García Rodero (Puertollano, 74 years old) is a tireless fighter who began half a century ago taking photographs in towns at festivals that were out of reach, in a Spain without highways and with trains that never seemed to reach their destination. La Niña, as some photographer called her disdainfully at the beginning, is today a National Prize winner and the first name in Spanish photography to enter the famous Magnum agency. Beyond the cliché of a party photographer, her humanistic gaze has been interested in people, in documenting how they feel and live. In these images taken from her new book, Being a Photographer, a Gift of Life (JdeJ Editores), you can see her warmth and closeness towards women, like that mother who hugs her saddened daughter, in a portrait that refers to the well-known man who Dorothea Lange took in a woman with her two children in Depression-era California.

They are all photographs with visual power, amplified by places like India, a special country for her, to which she returns whenever she can, despite the risk of ending up overwhelmed by the ecstatic crowd at one of her colorful celebrations. Or Haiti, with its purifying waterfall, where naked and trance-bound women and men invoke spirits to try to survive in one of the most miserable countries on Earth. There are also women who enjoy, while others are modest, wrapped in the veil of religion. And then there is the authenticity of the girls, initiated into rituals that their mothers and grandmothers surely already experienced. Brave and disobedient, García Rodero will continue with her cameras in every corner of the planet until her legs allow her, and wherever they take her she will look for the same thing as when it all started: photographing emotions.

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