Polyspam by Cristina de Middel SPECIAL EDITION

The large majority of us have, at some point in our lives, received scam emails from faraway strangers in desperate situations, promising large monetary rewards in return for our assistance thus appealing to both our mercy and greed. These emails have become so commonplace that they are more often than not directly deleted, as any quasi-savvy internet user is aware of the traps that lie behind these supposedly unique opportunities.

In Polyspam, however, Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel recovers these stories, reading each email and carefully analyzing the schemes hidden behind the text, offering a list of our complexes and sins as social beings. De Middel builds the robotic portrait of each sender, taking every single detail specified and translating them into images with special care in the dramatic ambient of the specific moment in which the email was sent. In doing so, De Middel certifies the existence of something too good to be true, creating impossible documents based on pure lies through her unique brand of documentary-fiction.