In spite of the inadequate distribution received since they were presented at the end of last year, the Memoirs of the V Latin American Colloquium of Photography (Memoria del V Coloquio Latinoamericano de Fotografía, Mexico, Conaculta, Centro de la Imagen, 2000), establish an important precedent for the assesment of a chapter begun with the first of these encounters held in Mexico City in 1978.
This volume allows us to venture into some of the new directions taken by photography and its analysis in countries south of the Rio Grande, although it also reveals the inconsistency of much of the thinking that repeats previously formulated ideas without contributing new perspectives to the topics that have distinguished these encounters, such as identity and modernity. There has been a lack of revision in the study methods concerning the phenomena brought forth by the development of the image in our days. This suggests that reflection on photography is still halfway between professionalism and improvisation, between the anecdote and discourses with a degree of abstraction that pose profound analysis.
This imbalance provides tangible evidence of a state of affairs that overflows the boundaries of photography in Latin America. The speed of the transformations within culture since the emergence of globalization and the failure of the unitary paradigms that had characterized photography as a discipline, point towards multiple directions that are impossible to place within fixed parameters. This was evident in the first encounters, where to some degree political discourse still served as a reference point to critically locate the image's scope and limits.
It is paradoxical to think that when these Memoirs were published (the colloquium was held in 1996), the Internet -which has been growing considerably in the past years- was generating more exchange of information and iconography than that which had taken place since the start of the Latin American encounters. The capacity and density of the new medium allows us to have a relatively current overview of the contemporary production of photography in Latin America, exceeding publications such as Luna Cornea and Extra Cámara (regrettably not published anymore), which are quoted as sources by various authors in this V Colloquium. Without doubt, the possibilities that are being opened by this new perspective require the establishment of new analytical references.
Is it possible to think of photographic processes at a continental level using new paradigms that go beyond overused models of analysis such as identity and exoticism? Two powerful answers put forward by Nadja Peregrino and José Antonio Molina in their respective conferences provide us with a new critical understanding: the first one focuses on the history of O'Cruzeiro magazine and the latter on contemporary Cuban photography. The relationship between Brazilian modernity and a medium which paid particular attention to photography during the decade going from 1944 to 1954, and the exploration of the links between the triad formed by metaphor, photography and history in Cuba in the nineties are two examples of the possibility of rethinking our affinities and our differences.
References such as the above allow us to take into account the political dimension that distinguished some of the best proposals in the first encounters, in particular the insistence on the analysis of the social significance of the photographers' work. Throughout the years, this idea got lost in a simplification that ended up as a mere stylistic documental reference with no substance: "engaged photography", an exhausted concept that has contributed little to the proper understanding of the events that took place in the seventies and eighties. Nevertheless, in those proposals one can find a key precedent for the reflection on the role of photography in Latin America in our days. In contrast to other movements in the arts, anchored exclusively in the tradition of art history, it is important to underline the possibilities allowed by establishing the image's social location, moving beyond said practice. This lets us take up the discussions that are evolving in the field of culture under multidisciplinary perspectives, precisely at a time when we are going through a process of reconstruction of the individual and the social.
How can we observe this phenomenon reflected in the photographs that are produced, distributed and analyzed in Latin America? It is fanciful to utopically think that photographs can be used to sustain a defensive position that protects local identities and traditions. To embrace the insecurity of a diverse, unequal and fragmented process of constructing the iconographic legacy seems to be the only projection that lets us think of an exponential growth in the acknowledgment of those that share this powerful bond of language and history. Far from longing for the existence of a Latin American canon, we will have to grow accustomed to the paradoxes that were exposed at an encounter where the falling apart of the unitary perspectives, and the pluralism this implies, requires the configuration of networks that can allow us to increase exchanges among ourselves, combing our customary long-term cycles with the brevity that circumstances demand.
The greatest problem of this new condition is without a doubt to give a sense to Latin American images, in the midst of an acceleration that contributes to its exact opposite under the unrelenting dynamics of the spectacle. In the face of such alienation, it becomes necessary to critically take advantage of the possibility of creating a narrative that is different from the dominant discourse of history and contemporary photographic critique, anchored in models that were developed in the United States and Europe. In some way, this was proposed by Boris Kossoy and Fernando Castro when they insisted on the importance of context in their presentations, which discussed the theory and methodology of the analysis of photographs and the photography vanguard in the first half of the 20th century in Peru, respectively.
Our ability to confront a contrasting and uneven reality in all the spheres of social life is perhaps the best available starting point to face this challenge. After all, an attribute of photography is its ability to set our imagination in motion by means of the paradoxical combination of different spatial and temporal dimensions under an appearance of stability.
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