PLATEA. Cinema as seen by photographers

Film and photography are forms of visual representation that use different narrative devices in their creative work. However, there is a connection between them that makes them complicit right from the very start of their existence: their use of the image as a shared expressive resource. Film employs moving frames to tell stories, whereas photography does the same using still shots. They are both open windows onto the world, through which we as spectators can enter the imaginary universe created by their authors. Film-makers and photographers use different languages, although they are both governed by one shared element, light, which each one draws on and shapes in their own particular way. The media and sensitive materials underpinning their stories are also different, although they almost always possess the ability to transfigure time, making the ephemeral everlasting and the temporal timeless.

The intention of this exhibition is to show how some of Spain's leading photographers look at film. Their gazes – documentary, conceptual, artistic – are diverse, although they all converge, through the creativity of the medium, and on the admiration and empathy that the spectacle of film prompts in all of us.