Isabel Muñoz is one of the main contemporary photographers, with an amazing international 40 years career, more than 150 Solo Exhibitions around the world, highly awarded, and recognized with “World Press Photo Award” (2000 and 2004) and the “National Award of Photography 2016”, in Spain.

Born in Barcelona, Spain (1951), she moved to Madrid to continue her studies in the photography field, developing her first professional steps also in Newbetween Madrid and New York, moving after to other countries in order to work out different and promising new projects. 

Muñoz is devoted to platinum developments and extra large formats, used in order to strengthen her message of passion for the body as a means of approaching the study of human beings.

She focuses her camera on dancers, wrestlers, warrior monks, bullfighters, prisoners, tribes, children, primates, horses and more recently the climate change, reflecting human ancestry- she does it with the strong sense of commitment that characterizes her and her photography.

 Her first individual exhibition, Toques (1986) at the French Institute in Madrid and her participation in Mois de la Photographie in Paris (1990) set her international projection. These lay out the first of hundreds of exhibitions throughout the main cities of Europe, the Americas and Asia.

On the occasion of the National Photography Award 2016 by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the exhibition “La antropología de los sentimientos” unveils at Tabacalera Promoción del Arte. In the exhibition, a themed itinerary around the obsessive and heterogeneous representation of human body is built, from the very beginnings of humanity, spirituality, madness, the limits and extremes of the body, the social dimension of the corporal and, finally, sexuality and desire.

The show is made up of a selection of the most representative photographic series of her current production.

The newspaper El Mundo chose Isabel’s body of work ‘Cosmos’ to represent them in the art fair Arco 2019.

Isabel’s photographs are shown in multiple permanent collections, such as Maison Européenne de la Photographie (París), New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Contemporary Art Museum (Houston), Foto Colectania (Barcelona), Instituto Cervantes (Mexico City, Guatemala City, La Paz in Bolivia, Shanghai in China), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Fundación Canal (Madrid). 

Her work has been widely recognized with numerous honours and distinctions. Recent awards include two World Press Photo prizes (2000 and 2004), Bartolomé Ros Prize (PHotoEspaña,2009), the Gold Medal to Fine Arts awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture (2009), UNICEF Spain Awareness Rasing Award (2010), Fundación DEARTE (2012), National Photography Award 2016 by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, Colección Himalaya Award 2017.

Art works I Exhibitions I Auctions

Career I Exhibitions

1951
Born in Barcelona.

1970
She moves to Madrid.

1979
She decides to turn her passion into a profession. She enrols at Photocentro to completely dedicate herself to professional photography.

1980
She meets Ramón Mourelle and Eduardo Momeñe, role model photographers for Isabel.

1981
First projects for the press and advertising sector. She meets Tote Trenas, who introduces her to the world of photography for cinema. She makes still photos for movies such as Sal gorda and Penumbra.

1982-1986
She decides to broaden her knowledge in New York. She enrols at Visual Studios and studies collage with John Wood and blueprint with Martha Madigan.

Obsessed with finding an ideal support to reproduce the skin, she continues her studies with Craig Stevens (platinum), Robert Steinberg (albumen) and Neil Selkirk (light). She goes back to New York to study large format at ICP.

1986
She returns to Madrid where she produces Toques, her first exhibition, at the French Institute.

1990
Encouraged by Chantal Cottard she travels to Paris where she meets Joel Brade.

1990 to 2007
She concentrates on travelling the world trying to share her emotions:

Through dance she carries out works in Cuba, Burkina Faso, Mali, Egypt, Turkey and with Víctor Ullate’s Ballet.

While in China she gets the opportunity to work in Beijing Circus school and carries out a work about martial arts in Shaolin.

She then moves to Cambodia where she works on dance and Khmer architecture. She also goes and meets the mutilated and addresses the subject on child trafficking and slavery in Southeast Asia.

She travels to Brazil and takes an interest in Capoeira. The series Toros, Drags and El imperio de los sentidoswill follow.

2003

Canon France gives her the Canon 1Ds with all its lenses and later the Canon 1D Mark II. It will make her rediscover colour and start working on digital colour.

2004

With the work Cuenca en la mirada, she rediscovers the magic of portrait.

2005

While in Iran she produces the works El suhjune and Bam en la memoria.

In Ethiopia she focuses on following all the tribes who decorate their bodies as a way of expression: the Surma, Nyangaton, Hammer, Banna, Bodi, Mursi, Karo and Nuer.

2006

Continuing with the subject on body language, she travels to El Salvador to take photos of the urban tribes and starts a work about violence: Maras

Back in Africa along with the NGO Plan España she continues with the subject of ethnic minorities, this time with the pygmies of Cameroon. And one year later she moves around the world with the project Nuestro pequeño mundo, an idea that arose with El País Semanal and which UNICEF assumes with enthusiasm, to photograph children on the occasion of the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Convention of the Rights of the Child.

2010

With El amor y el éxtasis she introduces herself in traditional rituals and different ways of reaching ecstasy. She travels to Iran, Syria, Turkey and Irak and exhibits the work as part of PhotoEspaña 2010, in the Canal de Isabel II exhibition halls in Madrid.

In the Centro Cultural de España in Mexico she unveils the exhibition La Bestia, whichgoes across Mexico packed with immigrants, with great risk for their lives, with the purpose of getting closer to the border and managing to cross to the United States of America.

She travels to Papua New Guinea where the inhabitants also decorate their bodies and as it happened with the tribes in Ethiopia, they get inspired by the nature that surround them to craft the ornaments they use to celebrate their rituals.

And continuing with the rituals she goes to Bolivia and takes photographs of dancers covered with clay wearing pre-Columbian masks that reveal their Incan mythological richness. She also photographs the worship of skulls, the ñatitas, cult to life and death, every devotee owns one and puts it in a high standing place of their house.

2015

So close to the origins, she turns her gaze to the great apes in search of primitive humanity. She travels several times to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also to Borneo and to primates shelters and care centers and by the end of 2015 she inaugurates the exhibitionÁlbum de familiain Blanca Berlin’s art gallery in Madrid.

During her trips to the Democratic Republic of the Congo she meets Caddy Adzuba and through her the dramatic situation of women and little girls in South Kivu, at the east of the country. The photographs are exhibited for the first time in the French Institute of Kinshasha and later in Bukavu. Casa Africa in Las Palmas produces a new exhibition that accompanied by the women’s own video testimonies could later be seen in the National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid.

2017

On the occasion of Madrid World Pride 2017 she exhibits at Centro Centro Madrid El derecho a amar with photographs of her serie Identidades, which she initiates in 2007-2008 with Brazil transsexuals, it also includes photographs of her serie Hijras that form the third gender in the Hindu Community and multiple sessions made throughout the years in her Madrid studio to people of diverse sexual orientation.

2018

Isabel introduces one of the last projects in which she is immersed, Agua. She presents it in Blanca Berlin Gallery as part of the retrospective exhibition organized in Tabacalera, La antropología de los sentimientos.
With this serie Isabel questions what kind of planet we are going to leave our children and grandchildren if we continue throwing plastics and garbage into the sea.

On the occasion of the National Photography Award 2016 the exhibition La antropología de los sentimientos unveils at Tabacalera Promoción del Arte. In the exhibition, a themed itinerary around the obsessive and heterogeneous representation of the human body is built, from the very beginnings of humanity, spirituality, madness, the limits and extremes of the body, the social dimension of the corporal and, finally, sexuality and desire. Curated by Audrey Hoareau and François Cheval, co-founders of The Red Eye, the showing is made up of a selection – nearly a hundred photographs and several audiovisual installations – of the most representative photographic series of her current production, many of which haven’t been shown to the public yet.

September 2018 to January 2019

The Prado Museum and the Friends of the Prado Museum Foundation present the fruits of the labor that twelve contemporary photographers, Isabel Muñoz among them, have carried out in intimate relation with the institution collections.