A New Season of the Photographic Year Has Kicked Off

Nearly twenty photographers from eight countries represented in “Haydee Santamaria” Art Collection of Our America, have been carpeting the walls of the Latin American Gallery since Friday 4, within the framework of the temporary show series of the Photographic Year, which began last April at Casa de las Americas.

The title, inspired by the must-read book written by Manuel Galich and published by Casa de las Americas’ Editorial Fund in 1979 ?Nuestros primeros padres (Our First Parents) ?, is an emphatic homage to the hundred-year anniversary of the birth of this outstanding Guatemalan intellectual and it joins the celebrations that have taken place at the institution to pay tribute to the founder of the Theater Department of Conjunto magazine, and vice-president of Casa de las Americas. 

Los primeros padres is made up of snapshots taken by Hector Garcia (Mexico, 1923-2012); Flor Garduño (Mexico, 1957); Paolo Gasparini (Italy/Venezuela, 1934); Frida Hartz (Mexico, 1960); Graciela Iturbide (Mexico, 1942); Nereo Lopez (Colombia, 1920); Nair Benedicto (Brazil, 1940); Lucia Chiriboga (Ecuador, 1954) and Martin Chambi (Peru, 1891-1973).

As for Chambi, 40 years after his passing away, the display features a special space because he was the first indigenous photographer, described as indigenist by some historians. According to the curators, “Chambi dared to subvert the social strata by elevating the racially displaced individual to the same category of the bourgeois characters he so was used to photographing. ‘El gigante de Paruro’ (1925) and ‘El organista de la capilla de Tinta’ (1935), are two paradigmatic examples of such irreverence, since he introduced these characters into the traditional photographic studio, a vetoed space for the people of ‘their kind’”.

The show is going to be open through December, with regular hours Monday - Friday.

Source: La Ventana