España oculta

For more than fifteen years, Cristina García Rodero traveled across Spain photographing local rituals, religious celebrations, pagan remnants and village festivities that were already beginning to fade. España oculta is the result of that work.

The book moves through small towns and rural regions, where belief, superstition and community life overlap without clear boundaries. Processions, masked figures, ecstatic gestures, moments of devotion and exhaustion — all rendered in a raw, uncompromising black and white. The photographs are intense, sometimes unsettling, often charged with physical presence.

García Rodero does not stand at a distance. She works close to the action. Faces fill the frame. Hands grip, bodies strain, costumes blur in movement. What emerges is not folklore as decoration, but a record of lived tradition — complex, contradictory, deeply human.

First published in 1989, España oculta remains one of the most significant photographic works on post-Franco Spain. It captures a country negotiating modernity while still rooted in older, visceral forms of collective expression.

This copy is signed by the artist.