Carlos Garaicoa incorporated both photographic prints and printed ceramic pieces for his show at Fundación ICO that was part of PhotoEspaña PHE 2012. La fotografía como intervención was the artist's first photographic retrospective.

The exhibition showed how Garaicoa has constantly questioned the role and nature of photography while dissolving the boundaries between realism and reality, between 2 and 3 dimensions. The show was experimental in many ways and contained surprising material transformations. Photographs of ceramic tiles in Malasaña (Madrid) manifested themselves as transformed physical objects. Alongside these works, images from his archive of photographs of Cuba were printed onto gelatin-coated bone and a room of routed and printed diptychs addressed the relationship between a negative and the objects it records. A group of sculptural pieces that took this even further - turning black and white photographs into intricate works mechanically carved into Polystyrene, was also shown in La fotografía como intervención.