hot2008latinamericanphotography

Tafos / Guelatao / Fotokids, Tafos:(49) Castigando al abusivo.

The Vast Terrain of Contemporary Photography in Latin America

Centre for Fine Arts
10, rue Royale Koningsstraat 10
Brussels
02 507 82 00
Opening Maps, Contemporary Photography
in Latin America
June 27-
September 21, 2008

At the heart of the Summer of Photography, the Opening Maps (Mapas abiertos) exhibition provides the most complete panorama ever presented of the artists, themes, and trends of contemporary photography in Central and South America and the Caribbean. Overseen by the Spanish curator Alejandro Castellote, this selection of more than 200 photographs results from several years of research and cooperation involving photographers, artists, critics, historians, and people in charge of cultural institutions in the countries of Latin America. Opening Maps has deliberately chosen to leave to one side the usual themes of Latin American art and explore the eclecticism and subjectivity of artists who are sometimes almost unknown. By approaching things from three angles (rituals of identity, scenarios, and alternative histories), however, the exhibition nonetheless succeeds in tracking down the common denominators of a Latin American outlook on the world.

Tatiana Parcero was born in Mexico City in 1967. In her work, her body is the primary subject. Using transparency overlays, she combines pictures of fragments of her body with diagrams from anatomy as well as old Aztec codices. She lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

A native of Brazil, André Cypriano was born in 1964 and educated in Sao Paulo with a university degree in business administration. Concerned with environmental issues, he contributed time and effort as the administrator of "Salva Mar" (Save the Sea) — a Brazilian organization dedicated to save the whales in northern Brazil.

In 1990, one year after relocating to the U.S., André began to study photography in San Francisco. He has since completed several projects which have been exhibited in several galleries and museums in Brazil, the U.S., and Europe.

André has been a recipient of the first place award in San Francisco City College's Photography Department of Scholarship (July 1992), the World Image Award Competition promoted by Photo District News in New York (December 1992), New Works Awards, promoted by En Foco in New York (July 1998), Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography (September 1999), Bolsa Vitae de Artes in Sao Paulo (January 2002), Caracas Think Tank (January 2003), as well as All Roads Photography Program from National Geographic Society (October 2005).

As part of a long-term project, Cypriano began to document traditional lifestyles and practices of less known societies in remote corners of the world with a slant toward the unique and unusual. Thus far, he has photographed the people of Nias, an island off the northwest coast of Sumatra (Nias – Jumping Stones), the dogs of Bali (Spiritual Quest), the infamous penitentiary of Candido Mendes in rio de Janeiro (The Devil's Cauldron, published by Cosac & Naify), the largest shanty town in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro (Rocinha, published by SENAC Editoras), as well as the most important shanty towns of Rio de Janeiro and Caracas (The Culture of the Informal Cities), His ongoing projects have been used in educational workshops.

André Cypriano is a free-lance photographer in New York and Rio, and continues to be involved in social and cultural activities.

Lucia Chiriboga was born in Quito, Ecuador in 1954. Today she is the director of that city's Visual Center Workshop for Photographic and Communications Research, a private foundation dedicated to the research, cataloguing and analysis of early Ecuadorian photography. Chiriboga is a sociologist, a photographer and a researcher on the history of photography. She has exhibited her photographic work and collections of historical images in Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, and Beijing, China.

Her solo exhibition, Cuenca, Ecuador was included in the 1997 Havana Biennial and she was represented in an exhibition of Latin American women in photography at the 1997 Arhus festival in Denmark. Chiriboga also has published articles and books including Portrait of the Amazon, Ecuador 1880-1945 (Retrato de la Amazonía Ecuador) and Naked Identity: Early Photographs of Andean Indians (Identidades Desnudas: La Temprana Fotografia del Indio de los Andes).

Luis González Palma, a modernist Latin American photographer, was born in 1957 and grew up in Guatemala where he later continued to live and opened up a portrait studio. He studied architecture and cinematography at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and then turned to photography. He has presented his work from 1989-present in more than 58 exhibitions in America and Europe.

Being of mixed or “mestizo” background, Palma’s photography focuses on the plight of the indigenous Maya and the mestizo people of Guatemala. His photographs are often meant to bring up psychological and culture issues into the viewers mind by incorporating distant gazes and mystical costumes that objectify and explain the pain these people, who are a minority in Guatemala, have gone through since before, during and after the intense genocide of their race.symbolism is very important in González Palma’s work since he uses symbols to get his strong ideas across. Along with symbolism González Palma uses sepia tints in all of his photographs and tends to leave the whites of the eyes not tinted to intensify the subject’s gaze which critics say helps bring out the issues that the artist is trying to explain or explore. Another strong part of his photography is that he tends to collage his photographs and layer on top of his subjects with important words or symbols.

Palma says that he tries "to portray the soul of a people" in his photographs but others disagree with him and claim that he exploits his subjects. It all comes down to the viewer in the end.

Roberto Stephenson was born in Rome in 1964 from Haitian father and Italian mother, he has lived in Rome, Italy, Aleppo, Syria, Amman, Jordan, New York, Ahmedabad, India, and London. He now lives in Port au Prince, Haiti.

He opened his first photographic studio in 1990 in Rome with 4 other photographers. In 1993 he left the studio and began to reassess his world view.

Nelson Garrido (Venezuela, b. 1952) practices both documentary and art photography. He places expressions of popular culture at the centre of both genres. In the series shown here he juxtaposes his own Venezuelan, Roman Catholic identity with the American consumer society. In this way Garrido creates a new iconographic language around themes such as violence, religion, sex and trends, through which he poses questions about the socially enforced concepts, feelings and religious experience in Venezuela.

Garrido has received various prizes, including the Best of Latin American Photography (1995). He teaches at several photography and design schools in Venezuela and lectures regularly.

Penna Prearo, 56, started in photography in 1972, working in the area of concerts and album covers. His work is included in collections in Brazil, Mexico, U.S., and Europe. He has work in the collections of MASP/Pirelli and MAM-Sao Paulo. His series Photos of Havana was included in the Curtiba Biennial of Photography. He won the JPMorgan prize in 1999.

Alexander Apóstol (Venezuela, b. 1969) is part of a younger generation that does not shun self-critique of the Latin American identity and prevailing cliches. For instance, in the photo series Pasatiempos (Pastime), 1998 he exposes the archetypical "Latin macho" image, as dictated by men's magazines. Apóstol's latest project, Residente Pulido (Polished Flats), 2002 is a follow-up on this theme. The rationalistic/modernist architecture dates from the 1950s, when the economies of Venezuela and other Latin American countries grew explosively, fueled by oil production. With digital techniques Apóstol has retouched out all the entrances, and covered their outside walls with glass or porcelain. His intervention turns the fifty-year-old flats into impenetrable monuments. The massive monoliths not only remind one of better, now bygone times; for Apóstol the buildings, with their closed but fragile exterior are also a metaphor for the arrogant, masculine male.

In 1989 Apóstol won the first prize at the Bienal Nacional de Arte in Guyana and the second prize at the Premio Nacional de Fotografía in Caracas, Venezuela. His work has subsequently been shown many times in the Americas.

Mario Cravo Neto was born in Salvador, Bahia in 1947. The son of Mario Cravo Junior, a well-known Brazilian sculptor, Cravo Neto (grandson) started creating art at an early age. Initially interested in sculpture, Cravo Neto turned his attention to photography in the late sixties. At the age of twenty, Cravo Neto moved to New York for two years to take classes at the Art Students League and set up a photo studio. It was this experience in New York that solidified his love for photography.

Cravo Neto's work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and is included in numerous monographs. His work is part of various private and public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo (Brazil).

Marcos Lopez was born in Santa Fe, Argentina in 1958. Until the age of 12 he lived in Galvez, a small town in that province, and then moved again to his native city where he lived with his family until 1982. Toward the end of the 1970s he studied engineering for several years and began, self-taught, to learn photography. In 1982 he moved to Buenos Aires, where he continued his training. He became actively involved in group activities with colleagues and artists from other disciplines.

He lives in Buenos Aires, working as a photographer and director of independent videos. He paints, works as a photojournalist, and directs independent videos, as well as working in his art photography practice.

Paula Luttringer (La Plata, Argentina, 1955) In 1977 was detained for five months in a CCD (secret detention centre), whilst finishing her studies of Botany at the natural Science Museum of the UNLP. Following this period of detention she went into Exile in Montevideo, Uruguay and San Pablo, Brazil where she worked as a trade dealer in emeralds and precious stones for the Gerais mines. From 1988 she continued developing this career in Paris and Amberes and four years later her specialised knowledge of precious stones led her to write a documentary script on the diamond trade. This was then filmed in Amberes, Jodphur, India and Kimberley (South Africa) and presented for TV on the channel Canal+ in France in 1995. In 1993 she returned to Buenos Aires and herself enrolled at the Argentinian School of photography. In the years following this she completed several courses of photography with Adriana Lestido, Juan Travnik and Humberto Rivas. With "El Matador" prize winner of PHotoEspaña 99, Paula Luttringer presented her first two individual exhibitions in the Photogallery of TMGSM in Buenos Aires (1998) and the Modern Art Centre in Quilmes, Argentina, 1999). In addition to participating in other collective exhibitions Paula Luttringer was selected in 1996 for the exhibit La Joven Generación (The young generation), Argentinian National Museum of Fine Art) and was one of the finalists in the Grand Prix SCAM du Portfolio Photographique (París, 1998). She currently lives between Cognac, France and Buenos Aires and is developing her photographic project El Lamento de los Muros that she began in 1997.

Originally trained as a sculptor, Vik Muniz uses unconventional materials, including chocolate syrup, sequins, and thread to recreate well-known works of art or images from popular culture. After he constructs his own version of their likeness, he photographs these new sculptural “drawings.” In the series Pictures of Dust, Muniz took the dust collected over several months by the maintenance staff at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and used it to create drawings based on installation photographs of the museum’s collection of Minimal and Post-minimal sculpture. In Muniz’s photographs of these renderings — printed at almost the scale of the sculptures themselves — the dust is easily discernable and its constituent hair, pebbles, and small scraps of paper appear larger than life. Ironically, dust is usually the nemesis of the pristine photographic print and polished sculptural surface. The photographs are in color, but due to the monochromatic nature of dirt and dust particles, appear black and white; quite possibly as the installation photographs, or the photographs from which Muniz learned about Minimal sculpture in the first place, also were. With this sort of visual trickery Muniz subverts photography by employing it to reveal its own unreliability.

Cecilia Paredes is interested in using art to explore the boundaries of nature. She often uses her own body as a medium for presenting a dialog between the spirit and the natural world. Born in Lima, Peru she currently lives and works in Philadelphia and San Jose, Costa Rica. Paredes has represented Costa Rica at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005. She has received the Bellagio Residency from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1998. Her solo show Borrowed World in 2006 was described by art critic Victoria Verlichak as “a glance over the natural and the prodigy and the creating of a totally new identity.”

Gerardo Suter's work is relevant not only in the field of fine arts, but also in technology. In his first works we see the utilization of photographic techniques with an expressive purpose which takes into consideration not only the environment's capability to reflect reality, in the grasp of its own space and time, but also the essential characteristics of the media. Therefore, using light to change the stability of the silver crystals, manipulating them according to his wish, he obtains a great diversity of visual qualities.

Fotokids/Fundacion de Ninos Artistas was founded in Guatemala in 1991 by ex-Reuters photojournalist Nancy McGirr, and was originally called "Out of the Dump." the project began with a group of six children, aged 5-12, who lived and worked in Guatemala City's vast garbage dump. Over the years, the project grew to include hundreds of children from other economically poor areas of the capital.

Since 1996, Fotokids has expanded to include communities outside Guatemala City. The Children in Conflict program documented the effects of 36 years of war on three Guatemalan communities, Santiago Atitlán, Santa Maria Tzejá, and Guatemala City, creating strong links between urban and rural youth. Fotokids currently involves more than 80 young people, ages 7-21, in six distinct communities, including Santiago Atitlán and Las Mangas, Honduras.

Cássio Vasconcellos was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil September 29, 1965. He delved into photography in 1981 at the Imagem-Açäo school. During his career his personal work always leaned toward artistic projects. His work has been shown in several galleries and museums in Brazil and abroad. He is frequently invited to develop new projects, such as Arte/Cidade in 1994 and 2002.

Maya Goded was born in Mexico and her work reflects much of the life and troubles of the country. She has won several awards, with her work being exhibited in South America, North America and Europe as well as featuring in a number of public photography collections in Mexico, the USA and Spain. Goded participated in the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass in 1996 and has nine publications to her name. Her most recent publications Plaza de la Soledad, and Good Girls include award-winning images of female prostitutes in Mexico City. She is represented by Magnum Photos.