by Armando Salazar Larrea
" is currently
invented to sell newspapers,
only interest is universal "
(Robert Frank)
invented to sell newspapers,
only interest is universal "
(Robert Frank)
This February I visited the World Press Photo exhibition at the Cultural Center Metropolitan, each year I return each year and sorry because it seems every time there is less room for other images in the global media than those of explicit violence and suffering.
The picture I liked best was one that showed some hope and excitement at the terrible dictatorship. The image is of a Caucasian woman on a beach in Spain with two new black immigrants landed, they are exhausted and his eyes reflected the fear of what can happen, the look of it is instead of understanding and compassion . The image is simple, she is kneeling next to the youth and offer them all possible that case: company and a blanket. There is tragedy in the image, but is implicit in the fact recorded, you do not wallow in grief and terror so that we can feel the enormous human tragedy on record. This is a documentary image .
picture: "The Beach" Arturo Rodriguez World Press Photo 2008
1. No sensationalism. Key starting point, the photographer records the event without too much explicit drama.
2. Emphasis is hidden feeling , ie the image not only informs but that moves us because it is capable of listening to the emotions of the characters portrayed.
3. is autonomous. image only need a caption that says where its occurrence, but without that explanation, defends its own as a life time filled with emotion.
4. A search meanings and a deep sense about what really matters in life.
5. A shooting temperament, you can feel what is important for the photographer, his being is involved. In Ecuador
el territorio de lo documental ha pasado bastante desapercibido. La idea se ha posicionado un poco en los últimos años con la aparición de los EDOC (Encuentros del Otro Cine), un festival de cine y video documental por donde han pasado cineastas y películas y donde en alguna ocasión se dedicó un capítulo a la fotografía documental. Otro momento importante se dio el año pasado con el Encuentro de Fotografía Documental organizado por el TIF (Taller Independiente de Fotografía) con algunas charlas sobre este oficio.
El desarrollo de nuestra fotografía más bien ha recorrido otros caminos: existe una mirada antropológica y costumbrista cargada de humor y surrealismo en las fotos de Hugo Cifuentes of 70 and 80, then a large group of photographers in the 90's turned his eye to the city: Pepe Aviles, Diego Cifuentes, María Teresa García, Lucía Chiriboga and Paco Salazar did a job that was quite early documentary that takes a turn to the forms and concepts of contemporary art as a movement disarming and entering the new millennium. Part of this move was the photographic exhibition in the bar El Pobre Diablo in the nineties as "three-eyed trio " and " these 3 photos are for you " was a new picture Ecuadorian author sought to differentiate the photographic treatment more general prevailing then.
must understand that not until the late nineties in Ecuador will begin the demarcation of photography competitions for the decade as the Hall PROESA who later became the symbol of freedom in (to engage in photojournalism) all played at the beginning, photography itself was what was valued, not emphatic in their differences. That legacy comes from what was the photo section of the House of Culture in the eighties worked under the concept of photo club, a concept that still exists in areas such as the Center of the Image of the Alliance Française.
At the present time the wave of digitization gives us the feeling of a photo boom: more photos and even cell phones are filled with images, the culture of the pixel space is being taken and taking pictures becomes as common as listening to music. Begins to be a cult apparatus, cablecito, the program, the computer, the model, a novelty. If a problem before the photograph might have been too much concentration on the technical rigors of the profession as exposure, light, or the final copy that were losing sight of its main objective: the creation of meaning today the problem rather is too much focus on novelty. When a digital camera on the table the dining room, no one hesitates to pick it up and shoot a picture, at the time of the film that was unthinkable. If you are looking for quality and not quantity this democratization is it beneficial?, The question is open for this time of change where they are still so nebulous benefits of modernity.
Traces of this wave are the current projects of young photographers as Giovanny Verdezoto and " those who remain," a series of photomontages with one foot in the documentary and the other in the fragmentation of the postmodern. Art photography made under the culture of the pixel, a kind of aestheticized documentary for the elite, where the problem is not in technique or the fact of the photomontage but that the emphasis on formal policy avoids eye.
On the other hand, no doubt, photographic space for further development and vitality in recent years is the photojournalism: Dolores Ochoa, Benjamin Chambers, Ivan Kashinski, Karla Gachet or Jorge Vinueza to are some of the current names rule the roost in this medium. Is the emergence of international photo agencies which positions these photojournalists as bearers of a trade with their own rules. Photojournalism Ecuador has grown in autonomy because publishers are beginning to understand that the image should not only be the registration of a news event, we find more and more images to look as author and you not only shocking images or desencubridoras scandals. The photographers begin to record events when the news is over and is no longer tied to the circumstantial needs. Slowly the picture of the newspaper has created a subnicho for no circumstantial reports are displayed in the Sunday editions of El Comercio and El Universo, here are stories and documentaries that do not depend on the news and focus on issues such as Chota football or a night on the emergence of Hospital Eugenio Espejo.
PHOTO "Blind Woman" Karla Gachet Publication: PEOPLE IN PICTURES
signs area development are published as " The look and memory - Photographs of Ecuador newspaper" (2006), "Imagined Ecuador" (2006), " People images "(2006)," A day like today in Ecuador "(2007) or" old Years "(2007), books full of photojournalistic and documentary images that have begun to populate the shelves of bookstores where once there were only pictures of volcanoes, the Galapagos and ancient cultures Ecuador.
(continued)
* This article was originally published in the journal CHASQUI 101, May 2008
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