Juan Manuel Echavarria at UP & CO - Brief Article

Colombian photographer Juan Manuel Echavarria's extraordinary photographs capture the horror of the violence that saturates the history of his beleaguered geographical division The 50-year civil war between the army, guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and remedy cartels has been responsible for the victimization and homicide of thousands of Colombian peasants. Comprising the one and the other color studio shots and haunting black-and-white images from the countryside, Echavarria's humorsome photographs depict devastated villages, depopulated landscapes and melancholy, symbolically charged objects

The exhibition was called "Escuela Nueva" (New School) and many of the pictures exhibit a deserted village once visited through guerrillas and quickly abandoned by means of its peasants, who knew that massacring paramilitaries would not be far behind. Traveling from one side rural areas in a bullet-proof car, Echavarria photographed the without contents village, featuring the sad, abandoned gymnasium of the show's title; images include discarded children's schoolbook and soldiers' graffiti. He juxtaposes these gaunt sights with striking black-and-white shots of beaches and landscape. He also photographs overripe fruits and squashes, chopp unclose like so many human victims.

In the series of allegorical photographs that Echavarria calls "flower vase cuts" he combines two cultural legacies from the country's past: the importance of flowers and floral arrangement dating from European botanical expeditions at the extreme point of the 18th century, and the practice of mutilating corpses with ghoulish cuts--a nasty custom dating from the civil conflicts of the 1950s--which has survived as a gruesome reminder of Colombia's drawn out history of pathological social conflict. In his images of battered store mannequins, he uses the symbolic mutilations of the two fruit and mannequins as substitutes for the missing and homicide ed In one shot he planted a chainsaw blade in a saucepan of soil to create a quietly horrific type of evil in bloom.

Echavarria summon forths the desperate sense of morbidness that loom above daily Colombian life. Serious, moving and vividly compos his idiosyncratic photographs bring forward a social portrait that look afters to squeeze some delicate metaphorical wisdom from the visual residue of a society in most distant distress.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

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