Massimiliano Gioni’s appointment as director of the New Museum in New York has brought attention back to the Italians running major cultural institutions abroad. As in the deck of cards printed with the faces of the most wanted, handed out 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 stay away. Whoever comes back is caught by the system and left to die somewhere between bureaucracy and political feuding.
But one card was left at the bottom of the deck: the one with Elisa Medde on it, for less than a year now the director of the Fundació Foto Colectania in Barcelona. The only Italian at the head of a photography institution abroad. Born in Nuoro, in Sardinia, with a degree in art history from La Sapienza in Rome, she landed in Amsterdam first as managing editor and then as editor-in-chief of FOAM Magazine, which under her became the coolest magazine in Europe, 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 field still active, gave her its award for photographic publishing.
The oversight is hardly surprising, in a society where everyone has a camera in their pocket but the people who work in photography enjoy the fame of a curling player. (Though the same goes for poets: who can name five contemporary Italian poets?) So it is no wonder that the name Foto Colectania means nothing to most people. And yet it is one of the liveliest operations in the field, and not only in Spain. Following Medde’s trajectory helps to understand not just what has happened to image culture over the past decade, but where it is heading: who decides which photography counts, and what happens when that decision stops being made in London or New York.
“To understand what my role is here in Barcelona, you first have to understand what Foto Colectania is”, she explains. The institution has existed for twenty-five years and collects Spanish and Portuguese photography from 1950 to the present. The date is not accidental, and there is something personal about it: Mario Rotllant, the foundation’s founder, was born the year after, in 1951, as though he had wanted his country’s history to begin just before his own. But 1950 is also the threshold of contemporary Spain: Franco is still in power, yet before long the transition to democracy will begin, and the movida, the counter-cultural explosion that came with it, first in Barcelona and then in Madrid. To photograph those years is to tell the story of a country mutating. Rotllant is an industrialist, at the top of Cobega, the family firm behind the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the world. Medde places him in the line of enlightened businessmen of the Olivetti kind. “An old-school captain of industry with a strong social conscience. He decided to create a foundation, to which he donated his collection, in order to preserve, disseminate and promote photographic languages for the community.” He built that collection together with Pepe Font de Mora, who directed the foundation until December 2025.
The way the collection was put together is its identity card: not iconic pieces but trajectories. More than three thousand photographs by just over a hundred authors, acquired as entire series, and as several series across the span of a life, in registers that could not be further apart: from fine prints to the most ephemeral and popular material — the fanzines, the photocopies, the record sleeves of someone like Miguel Trillo. Because the series also tells you how the life of images itself changes over time. “Collecting this way, you follow an author’s career, and you see not only how their poetics develop over time but also how the medium evolves. One of the original wishes was to support the field, to support photographers, to create a system that would allow the environment to keep going. And after twenty-five years you find yourself with a body of work that genuinely lets you make an excursus through the visual history of a country, which you could never do with single pieces: you would have no way of building a path, a continuous narrative.” This is the point at which an economic choice — giving up the market value of the famous shot — becomes a choice of thought. “Photography, especially from the 1950s onwards, is a discourse, not a word”, Medde says. “Having the whole series, the sequence, allows you to grasp what discourse is being made, what is being talked about and in what way.”
In twenty-five years the institution has acquired a structure: eight employees, the director included, who look after not only the photography collection but a photobook collection approaching 4,500 titles, a library open to the public, and an exhibition space that over the years has hosted both the rediscovery of Spanish photographers all but unknown beyond the Pyrenees and international names — Sarah Moon, Mary Ellen Mark, Daido Moriyama, Carrie Mae Weems — as well as, in 2017, “Fenómeno Fotolibro”, the largest exhibition ever devoted in Europe to the photobook, with Martin Parr and Erik Kessels among its curators. Every two or three years a show is built out of the collection; the next one, this autumn, will be curated by Florian Ebner, head of the photography department at the Pompidou. Foto Colectania is not MAPFRE, the wealthy insurance foundation of blockbuster exhibitions with venues in Barcelona and Madrid, and it does not have the capital of a MAST, the corporate art foundation in Bologna, or a Fondazione Prada in Milan behind it. “We are an independent non-profit without big money behind us, but precisely for that reason we are far more agile and dynamic than a public institution, which works to a different set of dynamics. We are somewhere in between.” And the twenty-fifth anniversary presents itself as a ridge from which to try to see the future: “My task is to try to think about how an institution that deals with photography in such a specific way can have a role over the next twenty-five years. And how one part of the history of European photography — the Spanish and Portuguese part, so little known outside the official canon — can find its own international space.” In that attempt, Medde is expected to bring something of her own: “One of my greatest interests is shifting the discourse about photography from ‘what it is’ to ‘what it does’, or what we want it to do, or what we do with it.”
But, as we were saying, before arriving in Barcelona Medde spent thirteen years at Foam. Which is not merely a line on a CV. In the years when she arrives, between 2010 and 2011, the Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam is the most dynamic institution in Europe in its field, and is about to explode along with the photobook phenomenon. Its slogan was a small manifesto: “Foam is not a museum, nor a magazine. Foam has a museum, Foam has a magazine.” The idea was that photography could be experienced on several platforms at once — the museum in the city, the fair, the pop-ups around town, even a radio programme, and a magazine that worked as a portable, international institution. Its DNA, Medde says, was “to create a conversation that would bridge different ways of experiencing photography”: in the same issue, and at the same moment, historical names and emerging authors, famous works and forgotten ones.
Inside that machine Medde conceived the magazine as a group show on paper, curated issue by issue. And above all she became the driving force behind the Foam Talent Call, the programme that ended up identifying her. It worked by open call, entered not with one portfolio but two, which made it possible to gauge the “solidity of the research”. Between 1,500 and 2,500 authors applied each year, from ninety countries; at most twenty were chosen. The selection was made in-house, by choice: not an outside jury to take cover behind, but an assumption of responsibility. “This is what we see” was the sense of it. Every year Medde looked at every single application, from the first to the last. Through that school passed, among many other curling players, Sara Cwynar, Silvia Rosi, Sohei Nishino, Lucas Foglia, Aaron Schuman, Davide Monteleone, Alejandro Cartagena. “The prize didn’t build careers from nothing; it acted rather as a multiplier, giving visibility to trajectories that would have been solid anyway.” And yet the Talent, which made her name, was not the work she cared about most. That was the magazine’s thematic issues, her real curatorial practice “on paper rather than on the wall”: each issue an idea, with masters and first-timers in the same space. One of those issues, “Trip”, with Ricardo Cases on the cover, even ended up inside a scene of Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It” — the characters on the sofa and, at the top of the pile of books on the coffee table, in full view, Foam Magazine.
Her method, in those years, comes into focus. First: separate your own taste from what you think works. Second: don’t be afraid of what you don’t understand. Medde has a classical training, art history in Rome, iconology and iconography, “extremely Eurocentric”, as she puts it. Faced with a visual system entirely different from her own — photography from parts of the world for which she has no eye — the reaction is not suspicion but curiosity. Third: ask whether, and how far, the person in front of you has something to say, and how they use the medium to say it. A great deal of it, she admits, “happens in the gut”: if an image lodges itself in the retina and keeps coming back for days, it means something. She can barely stand photographers’ statements: “I couldn’t care less” — an exaggeration, she concedes at once, but the point is that for her the images come first. “I need the disquiet of images, their indeterminacy, I need to see something that puts me in a position not of discomfort but that moves me.” Context, theory, the sociological architecture behind a body of work come afterwards. First there has to be the jolt. She likes to look at images with a “childlike spirit of discovery”: having no idea what they are, and being surprised by them for precisely that reason.
It was this approach they were after in Barcelona, rather than a luxurious address book. “It’s a way of looking at things. You can look that way at a photograph that comes from the other side of the planet or at one taken on your own doorstep.” The point, for a foundation that collects a century of Iberian photography, is that this gaze is exactly what is needed. The history of photography we have inherited, Medde observes, is “highly white, Anglo-Saxon, male”; the Mediterranean area, on both sides of the sea, has a great deal more to offer and almost never lets it out, neither on the historical side nor on the contemporary one. Spain is codified around a handful of names — Ramón Masats, Joan Colom, Cristina García Rodero, and more recently Joan Fontcuberta or Cristina De Middel — but beneath that narrow canon lies a continent. Medde gives an example: Carlos Pérez Siquier, who photographed “in the manner of Martin Parr before Martin Parr”, and was discovered by Parr himself during a visit to Barcelona. Or Virxilio Vieitez, a black-and-white photographer of the 1950s and 1960s with whom she herself fell “madly in love” a few months ago, having had no idea until shortly before that he existed: a photographer who recalls August Sander in places and Diane Arbus in others, and is nonetheless thoroughly Spanish, admired even by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who included him in his “imaginary museum”, the exhibition with which he inaugurated the foundation that bears his name. And not only men, nor only Spaniards. Alongside a rediscovery such as Pilar Aymerich — the photographer of Spain’s transition to democracy and of the Catalan feminist movements, celebrated at home and almost unknown abroad — the collection holds a fully canonical figure like the Portuguese artist Helena Almeida, who has passed through the Venice Biennale and the Jeu de Paume.
Activating these connections, bringing back to the surface what the official canon left out, is the heart of Medde’s mandate. What remains is the more delicate question, the balance between the international and the local. Foto Colectania is deeply rooted in a territory, and yet Medde arrives from Holland knowing very little about it, and turns that ignorance into an asset: it allows her to look “free of the prejudices of a national view”. And the territory, in any case, is no longer the one of 1950. “The demographics of the Mediterranean have changed profoundly over the past fifty years”, she explains, “and the languages are more hybrid, the stories more complex, the points of view new. Paying attention to all these voices is another part of my role here.” The public, in all this, is not a given but something built: you educate it as they did in Amsterdam, by putting the master and the newcomer, the famous and the forgotten, in front of it in the same space.
And how does Italy look to someone who has watched it from years spent in Holland and now from Spain? “Enormous progress has been made compared with twenty years ago. But I would like there to be institutions like Foto Colectania. What we lack is the idea of an institution halfway between the large public body and the small, perhaps artist-run space — one that deals with photography without depending on the political moods of the moment or on the demands of entertainment. I’m convinced that the Barcelona model is exportable. It would be good if in Italy too such organisations were founded, consolidated and lasted over time, capable of the same international ambition, the same continuity, the same freedom.”
