San Francisco
Fourth World: Current Photography from Colombia at SF Camerawork
From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you John Zarobell’s review of Fourth World: Current Photography from Colombia at SF Camerawork. Zarobell notes that Fourth World follows a survey of contemporary photography from Mexico: “Taken together, these exhibitions make SF Camerawork preeminent in presenting contemporary Latin American photography in the Bay Area. Such a program […] suggests other avenues that SF Camerawork could explore in order to continue to diversify the offerings of global contemporary art in the Bay Area.” This article was originally published on May 26, 2015.
Andres Felipe Orjuela. Luis Aldana Uno de los Antisociales Detenidos en la Mañana de Hoy Cuando Trataba de Huir (Luis Aldana One of the Antisocial Arrested in the Morning While Trying to Escape), 2014; photograph on cotton paper, illuminated with Marshall’s pigments. Courtesy of the Artist and SF Camerawork.
SF Camerawork’s current exhibition of contemporary Colombian photography was curated by a pair of Colombian curators, Carolina de Ponce de León (former executive director of Galería de la Raza) and Santiago Rudea Fajardo, an independent curator and critic. Though the exhibition features only four artists, it successfully captures a wide range of topics and approaches in the photographic medium.
Zoraida Diaz and Luz Elena Castro are primarily photojournalists whose straight photography captures the political context of Colombia in the 1980s, as well as more recent images from political protests in Baltimore this spring produced by Diaz. Diaz has a fantastic eye for human expression, unearthing a deeper truth behind protests and political events. Castro is subtler, and her array of images covering revolutionary violence and peace negotiations say much more about the exercise of power than any protest slogan could. Her empathy for her subjects is nowhere sharper than in La Moda Nace Aqui [Fashion is Born Here] (1993), a portrait of a young girl selling toy cars on the street in Leticia, Bogotá in front of a closed boutique with a painted mural on the front of its security shutter. The child is dressed in her Sunday best and she just beams in front of a shabby, awkward mural of a fashionably dressed woman. Her pride makes the viewer forget that this is an image of child labor.
