Gloria Oyarzábal Lodge

Gloria Oyarzabal (born 1971) is a Spanish visual artist and teacher who works in photography and cinema. She was the co-founder of the Independent Cinema “La Enana Marrón” (The Brown Dwarf) in Madrid (1999–2009), a theater that showcased films d'auteur and "experimental and alternative cinema." She is the winner of several international photography awards and prizes.

Early life Oyarzabal was born in London. Oyarzabal lived in Mali for three years, researching "the ideal of Africa that Europe has created for its own benefit".

Career In 2016, Oyarzabal created a "docu-fiction" photography collection centred on Sir John Everett Millais's Ophelia, which was featured in The Huffington Post. She views Ophelia as the ultimate symbol of women's oppression. After being displayed at the Landskrona Foto Festival, the newly renamed Picnos Tshombé photobook went on to be presented and published in Arles, gaining international recognition. This work, Pink Girl, Woman go no'gree, was also re-produced in The Guardian in 2019.

In 2020, Oyarzabal was the winner of aperture PhotoBook of the Year for Woman go no'gree. The book explores colonialism and white feminism through the use of found images and archives from West Africa and her own photographs. A review in the photography magazine Conscientious states, "The viewer is made to look at women living in Africa in a variety of ways, and the overall feeling is one of self-determination: these women neither need colonial administrators to tell them what to do nor contemporary men from their own or any other culture."

Works

Woman go no'gree, RM/Vevey Images, 2021.

Awards

2017 Landskrona Foto Dummy Award 2019 Images Vevey Dummy Award 2019 PHOTO IS:RAEL Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography 2019 Grand Prix Fotofestiwal 2020 aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-Up