The collective of photographers which operated under the name AFAL Group hailed from the publication AFAL, a magazine specialised in film and photography, published over a six-year period, from 1956 to 1963, and coordinated from Almería by José María Artero García (Almería, 1928–1991) and Carlos Pérez Siquier (Almería, 1930). Its independent approach and fresh tone soon attracted inquiring photographers from all over Spain, thus turning the magazine into a force driving behind the renewal of post-war Spanish photography.

The point of departure of the exhibition An Approach to AFAL. The Autric-Tamayo Donation is the Autric-Tamayo family’s one-off donation to the Museo Reina Sofía’s photographic collection, also expanded in recent years with the donations of Carlos Pérez Siquier and other AFAL photographers and successors. Of the 700 works from this significant donation, more than 200 have been chosen for the present exhibition. Moreover, these new additions also make the Museo Reina Sofía a leading light in the study and understanding of the AFAL Group, one of the most internationally renowned photographic collectives in the second half of the twentieth century.

The show is structured around concepts which shaped the period: the aesthetic tensions and key approaches defining the photographers from the group, framed within Formalism and Documentalism, Humanism and Experimentation, reportage and essays. The exhibition, therefore, brings together 13 artists from different coordinates in Spain whose heartland and meeting point for two decades was in Almería.