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Lucho Mejia political status of the act of seeing

by Francois Laso
(text read the book launch of Lucho Mejia in the Ministry of Culture )

GOOD NIGHT, I have been asked to speak to Luis Mejia of your picture but most of what it means for someone like me, collect legacy of his work.

will appeal to my memories and inevitably talk about images that are not here. Talk about some photos that even today, I'm not sure if I see extraordinary because of the image on the retina and from there to the memory, there is an unfathomable that manages travel and perverted, or because my own perceptual experience of this city repeats itself from the sixties, is founded in every corner, with photos I found in a infotografiable afternoon at the home of Don Lucho.

And that's why there are "old", as stated in art schools, outdated, but wise, to illuminate the journey of perception of reality to the retina and its background to the memory, speech, language and, again, we're lucky, photography. For a photographer like me, confused form with substance and Cartier-Bresson with the Holy Spirit (and then I did good atheist), discover a celestial and heavenly edition published by the Central Bank on struggle cheek and published in 1989, explained in my the trappings of spirit, devotion to the saint and the content of the photograph.

Women the door of the Church of San Francisco. Quito, 1982. TITLE: APPOINTMENT.

Luis "Tinta China" Castañeda. Boxer - coach. Coliseo Julio Cesar Hidalgo.
Quito, 1984: TITLE: LUIS "INK CHINA" CASTANEDA

If something is missing in the young, from photography, is l a possibility of a link to our images of the past . The look is a construction, but when you know how we have been glimpsed as a picture, as we have been regarded, foolishly repeat the same image to death. No, we reinterpreted, look at us again. That unhappiness is deeply linked to the uses that might makes subtly images. Does not prevent us to do: prevent the meet. The much-battered subject of our lack of memory has nothing to do with an alleged and extraordinary ability to forget (as we constantly repeat it) but with a constant practice of hiding from the media, state and files. There, from such practices, a reality more important than others: beautiful landscapes uninhabited and hide and supersedes multicolored cotidianidades less exotic and picturesque. If you see

these pictures carefully, learn from Don Lucho, meaning the distance. The exact space that exists between the photographer and the world body's ethics, bioethics ... Gombrich says. Learn to see like a big, SEE HOW MEJIA: keen eye for photography is not only politics, the political condition of the act of seeing . Is that the struggle is a be-eye. Or, if you will, a being-red, to me, in these pictures here exhibited less talk of a city as any in the sixties in Latin America, this is the haunting story of recent times, and much, much more of a city built from the look , in some sixty unique and special for our ... this is the picture of a photographer and that is far more revealing than a horrible building, half constructed, on pastures Iñaquito.

That is easy to say but not easy: The paper holds all ... a non-negative.

Otavalo Indian pending a hearing with a judge in the courthouse
. Quito, 1966. TITLE: THE PLEASURE

Children in Colonial Quito sector. 1966. TITLE: THE GUM.

In the sixties there were 3 coups Velasco Ibarra, Arosemena Arosemena other more, a certain Yerovi and Velasco again. On a Caribbean island, a revolution, there was a moon rock, as far as absurd and there was also a memorable roll no virgin. And it was all that and nothing else. Mejia set out to rescue the seemingly insignificant value and dignity of the, obviously, trampled. And every light his aesthetic search testified marginalized with an incredible consistency (aesthetic and philosophical) and a deep sense of distance: Mejía, the political act of seeing, is at the same time photographing and being photographed . If nothing else is learned from Don Lucho, is its ability to blend hallucinatory in and with the other and if one more thing, one of many, one learns of Don Lucho, is that photography is an act of compassion.

The paper holds all ... a non-negative.

Builders doing the excavation for the foundation of the overpass
August 10th Avenues and Patria, Quito, 1969. TITLE: QUARTET

I look at the man in the midst of their struggle to survive in a hostile society, talk about your picture and talk about it. Ours is a hostile society, of the disinherited ... there are, every day and in our day, l photographs as Dolores Ochoa, Ricardo Bohorquez and Alejandro Reinoso who are daughters of those cheek .... and there is Mejía, disinherited, almost forgotten and an economy that is known ... but not spoken. Paradoxes of power and wonders of photography. The craft is learned from humility, constantly reminds me when I look Lucho Mejia, from the deep bow to reality, from its obtuse nature. We are children of the story we build and we are children of the images that we retain and remember, we are children of the politics of seeing, l photographers today you are children of Lucho Mejia.

Al TODAY him beside me deeply would be a mirror ... because today, Don Lucho, I want to be like you ...

Quito, January 14, 2008

Photos from the book Luis Mejia. Photographic collection of Ecuador.
Volume 1. Ediciones del Banco Central del Ecuador, Quito, 1989.