Spain's leading photography festival, PhotoEspaña, held its official opening in Madrid this month. By September, nearly 100 exhibitions will have showcased the work of more than 300 visual artists in the capital and across the country, loosely corralled under the theme of reimagining. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

Fundación Mapfre hosts an expansive overview of the career of Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena, including three series focusing on the US-Mexico border: Invisible Line, Between Borders, and Los Americanos. Of the border wall, he says: "It's potent, it shows its power all the time. Wherever you look, there's these jagged lines or these massive concrete walls that are cutting and showing that we are different. They are from the north, we are from the south and the cultures don't mix. There's this obsession with being separate, being two different cultures."

The effects of separation can be devastating. "One of the interesting or more poignant things of this experience was how the border, the wall, basically dissolves the idea of identity and personhood," Cartagena says. "And I'm iterating on the same idea. Who am I? Who are the people that live around me? Who are we as Mexicans? Who are we as Americans? And this physicality of the wall basically erases us and we become generic, we become no one."

At the Museo del Romanticismo, Laia Abril presents an intimate show on endometriosis. Seven life-size portraits depict six women and a trans man in postures they adopt to manage their pain. "The idea was to visualise in real size," she says. "Their bodies in moments of pain, but also they were showing us what are the different positions they take when they try to have relief from that pain." The portraits are taken from above, referencing the out-of-body experiences she endures while coping with her own pain.

At the Fernán Gómez centre, a retrospective of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen, Lux and Umbra, explores a career marked by restless eclecticism. Themes of death, sexuality, and mourning recur on strictly ambiguous terms. Even the umbra (shadow) has various meanings, appearing as abstract or representational, staged or natural, literal or metaphorical.

At Circulo de Bellas Artes, Polish photographer Rafał Milach's exhibition explores engaged documentary practice. Avowing that "protest photography is quite boring visually, it always looks the same," Milach directs his energies towards making work accessible via the Archive of Public Protests, a platform for photographs addressing social and political tensions in Poland and eastern Europe. Banners, murals, and free newspapers feature in the exhibition.

PhotoEspaña takes its theme from Reimagining, a diverse group show of 13 projects. Among them, Txema Salvans' Wreckage of a Catastrophe takes a caustic look at life on the road. Jon Gorospe's The Grid uses video and audio to examine commuting environments. Aleix Plademunt displays over 120 black-and-white photographs evoking a colonial gaze on rubber trees in the Peruvian rainforest. Eduardo Nave's Espacio Disponible, described as "the opposite of Times Square," photographs empty, rusting billboards advertising their own obsolescence.

Two exhibitions pay homage to canonical photobooks: Richard Avedon. In the American West, 1979-1984 at Fundación Mapfre, and Robert Frank and The Americans at Espacio Fundación Telefónica.