Battered Latin America

Battered Latin America is is the latest project of Alexis Fabry, curator and connoisseur of the photographic reality of Latin America. The photographs, scratched, slit or torn, haunted by the wounds of a continent, outline the shape of an oppressed landscape of Latin America's non-egalitarian societies. In a selection of carefully studied images, the book contains the work of the most important photographers of Latin American such as Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Fernell Franco, Paz Ererazuriz, Luc Chessex, Johanna Calle, Paolo Gasparini or Graciela Iturbide to name a few. The walls of an architecture in ruins, scored, scarified, discolored by saltpeter, in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Cuba, Mexico, bear the wounds of time and the traces of political struggles... The stones of the ancient civilizations were torn up and divested of their coloring to construct the modernist utopia, but neither urban ghosts nor the specter of revolution have saved Latin America from the abyss of violence. The Mexican Revolution, the very first of the twentieth century, would dwindle down into the dictablanda of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. A few decades later, the hopes of the Cuban revolution would come to wrack in disillusion. In other parts of the hemisphere, attempts at consolidating democracy were dragged down by authoritarian regimes and civil war. An informal economy has been sustained by the drug trade that also finances guerilla movements and penetrates the very workings of government. These photographs, many of them scratched, scarified, incised, inhabited by the lacerations of an entire region, trace the lineaments of a tortured landscape.