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Vari Caramés, the poetry of everyday life wins the 2026 National Photography Prize
The photography of Vari Caramés (Ferrol, 1953) finds a territory of discovery in the everyday. His images shy away from the explicit and the obvious, delving into a more ambiguous reality where smudges, reflections, and blurs open up new possibilities for interpretation. This unique way of seeing, developed over more than four decades, earned him the 2026 National Photography Prize, awarded by the Ministry of Culture and endowed with 30,000 euros.
The jury highlighted the enduring relevance and contemporary nature of his work, as well as his contribution to artistic photography and his role in the cultural renewal of Galicia since the 1980s. They also emphasized the artist's ability to expand the expressive possibilities of photography, bringing it closer to pictorial abstraction through visual resources that have ultimately defined a unique and recognizable universe.
Instead of trying to show everything, Caramés proposes a photography that suggests more than it reveals. His images invite us to pause and contemplate what usually goes unnoticed, discovering, beneath the surface of the familiar, a poetic and mysterious dimension. Evocation, uncertainty, and the hidden worlds within everyday reality are some of the fundamental axes of a body of work that has maintained its distinctive character over time.
The award also highlights Caramés' role in the renewal of Galician photographic culture. Since his first exhibitions in A Coruña in 1980, the photographer has developed a career marked by experimentation and a unique perspective on his surroundings. In 1986, he participated in the second edition of the Vigovisión Photo Biennial, a project that brought together six photographers from different countries to photograph Vigo over the course of a week.
Subsequently, her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Madrid and Barcelona, as well as in group shows in various cities in Spain, Portugal, and France. This exhibition presence has helped to solidify a body of work that transcends the mere documentation of places to explore their emotional and visual resonances.
The sea, ports, train stations, streets, and people pausing for a moment are some of the recurring motifs in his photography. Through them, Caramés transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary and constructs scenes that seem to exist between reality and dream. His blurring and reflections are not mere formal devices, but rather instruments for questioning perception and shifting the image into a realm of suggestion.
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