As simple as it was efficacious, August Sander’s approach to photography in his encyclopedic series “People of the 20th Century” is a model whose influence continues to be felt. It is not hard to detect its impact on the British photographer Vanessa Winship’s series “Sweet Nothings: Rural Schoolgirls from the Borderlands of Eastern Anatolia,” 2008, which was published as a book in 2009. Like Sander’s work, Winship’s portraits take a frontal approach and maintain a uniform distance from the subject; the human figure is presented straightforwardly and within his or her everyday environment. Thus,

Two years ago Diego Santomé curated an exhibition at Parra & Romero titled “La Importancia del Pez Cebra” (The Importance of Zebrafish), a group show exploring the pertinence of a potential connection between the art of the 1960s and contemporary sculptures based on austere and everyday materials with human scale and down-to-earth ambitions. What was particularly striking then, as it is now in his recent solo exhibition, “Nuevas visiones desde el Congo” (New Visions from Congo), was the exoticism of its title. What’s all that about? Santomé has never seemed much interested in geopolitical or