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The renowned photographer Cristina De Middel Puch has been awarded this noon with the Outstanding Alumni Award 2023, a prize that the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has been giving since 2016 to the most relevant member of the Alumni Collective for her professional and personal career, her recognised prestige, her social work and for her notorious contribution to promoting the image and objectives of the UPV.

National Photography Prize, among her many honours

Graduated in Fine Arts (2001) at the Faculty of Fine Arts, De Middel was nominated for the Deutsche Börse in 2013 for the publication of her photobook "Afronauts," which tells the story of Zambia's short-lived space programme in South Africa. In the same year, the impact and quality of this work won her the Infinity Award from the International Centre of Photography.

Among his many accolades, the 2017 National Photography Prize, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, which highlighted her ability to rethink the limits of the photographic language's reality, demonstrating her ability to challenge conventions and open up new possibilities in the field of documentary and artistic photography, is also undoubtedly noteworthy.

Her influence on the industry became clear in 2022 when the prestigious Magnum Agency, founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, chose her as its new director. Later that year, the UPV Faculty of Fine Arts awarded her the San Carlos Medal in recognition of her personal and artistic career.

Invited to curate festivals such as Lagos Photo, PhotoEspaña and San José Photo in Uruguay, Cristina has published 14 photography books, and her work is constantly exhibited in different institutions and spaces. She is also a board member of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and sits on the board of Vist Projects, a platform supporting Latin American visual narrative.

"Look for images that challenge you because the easy way leads to manipulation"

De Middel, who also inaugurated her exhibition "Degrees of Domestication" - an exhibition of 11 photographs that will be open to the public from today in the Blue Room of the Faculty of Fine Arts - was delighted to be recognised in the place "where it all began". It is an honour and, at the same time, a trigger of many memories, of nostalgia... It is like going home, transformed into a different person, and talking to the Cristina of 22 years ago. It's very exciting.

The photographer, whose presidency of Magnum has not led her to leave the field: "I am still very much involved in the creative process, having ideas and developing them; now I have to combine it with making business decisions. At the expense of my health, my brain has been stretched a bit more," she says, continuing her fight to promote thinking: "The core of my work is to fight against this drift towards an audience that thinks less and less and is more and more manipulable. Any image that you swallow without chewing discard it. Look for images that place you in more complicated points, that hold you back, that make you think, and maybe that is to impose images on you that you disagree with in the first place. You have to make things a bit more difficult for yourself because the easy way leads to manipulation, propaganda and the things happening in this country.

Regarding the current irruption of Artificial Intelligence, De Middel admits that she is currently "in cat mode with all her claws out because I see a powerful tool in the hands of a society that hasn't done the training. It's like giving a machine gun to a chimpanzee without making any literal associations. If we don't yet know how to read images and be aware of their power, opening the range to make everything possible without knowing where the limits are seems very dangerous to me. In the future, when we have learned, if we learn, how to control it, it could be a useful tool, but for now, I see that this sea in which we are drifting has suddenly become an ocean".

An exceptional list of achievements

With this recognition as Outstanding Alumni 2023, Cristina De Middel's name joins those of her 8 predecessors: Carlos Ledó (agricultural engineer and CEO of Idai Nature / 2016), Enrique Belda (civil engineer and Deputy Director General of Information Systems and Communications for Security at the Ministry of the Interior / 2017), José Vicente Tomás (prize-winning industrial engineer, founder of Kerajet and the Jaume I Award / 2018), Sara Perales (industrial engineer and founder of Green Blue Management / 2019), Ramón Esteve (architect, (architect, selected by Forbes as one of the world's 100 most creative people and awarded the Land Rober Born prize for the renovation of the Bombas Gens building / 2020), Rocío Cortés (administrator and company director and founder of MundoArti / 2021), Regina Monsalve (agricultural technical engineer and president of the College of Agricultural Technical Engineers of Valencia and Castellón / 2022 ex aequo) and Raúl Polit (architect and member of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory / 2022 ex aequo).

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