The 14th edition of the PHotoEspana festival opens on Tuesday, showcasing work by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff, Hans-Peter Feldman and Alfredo Jaar under the theme Interfaces: Portraiture and Communication.

The festival, which runs from 01 June - 24 July, gathers together 66 exhibitions, including 21 in the Official Selection and 31 in the Festival Off. The majority of work is on show in Madrid, where PHE11 will also hold over 60 activities including workshops, talks, debates and portfolio reviews, but some parts of the festival will also be held in Lisbon, Cuenca and Alcala de Henares. 

Gerardo Mosquera, chief curator of the next three installments of the PHotoEspana festival, has opted to open his residency with a series of exhibitions on portraiture, including the flagship show Face Contact, featuring work by 31 artists including Hans-Peter Feldman, Shilpa Gupta and Jorge Ribalta, whose 'portrait' of Frankenstein's monster is shown above. 1000 Faces / 0 Faces / 1 Face. Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff, Frank Montero Collado contrasts two of the best-known photographers of our time with relatively unknown images taken by Collado in the 19th and early 20th Century.

Ron Galella (who took the shot of Jack Nicholson shown above) is showing over 100 of his at times controversial images in Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire! His work is showing at the Circulo des Bellas Artes, Madrid, alongside another exhibition controversial for other reasons - Blazing Camera: The Prostitutes of Fernell Franco includes the image of an incredibly young prostitute shown above, among other shots of sexual works in Cali, in the Pacific port of Colombia in the 1970s.

PHotoEspana also includes Descubrimientos PHE [PHE Discoveries], an annual competition for emerging photographers. This year more than 1300 works were entered - 911 in the Madrid convocaton, 149 in the Managua convocation and 242 in the Cartagena de Indias - and the 70 finalists of the Madrid convocation will present their work to 23 photography specialists at PHE11, including Thomas Seelig from the Winterthur PhotoMuseum, Edward Robinson from LACMA and Michiko Kasahara from the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. 

Click here for more information about the festival exhibitions and workshops.