Photo District News :: Image and Memory

Image and Memory:
Photography from Latin America, 1866-1994

Edited By
Wendy Watriss & Lois Parkinson Zamora
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FotoFest’s latest exhibition Faces of History – Latin America, organized in conjunction with arts>Brookfield Properties , highlights important late 19th and early 20th Century photographers from five Latin American countries – Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. Their works are a profile of change – the mass availability of photography as an instrument for personal portraiture and collective communication and the emergence of new social classes created by the industrial growth of the late 1800s and early 1900s in Latin America. The photographers and their studios were important institutions in their time, recording life across economic and social lines, from native laborers to the wealthy and politically powerful, in these bustling, turn of the century, Latin American cities.

“As photographers ourselves and later founders of FotoFest, we had over 25 years working with photography in Latin America. Its photographic heritage is immensely rich,” says curator and FotoFest co-founder Wendy Watriss. FotoFest did a ground-breaking series of exhibitions on photography by Latin America photographers at the FotoFest 1992 Biennial in Houston. The exhibitions became the basis for a national traveling show and an award-winning bi-lingual book, Photography from Latin America, 1865-1992 published by University of Texas Press (1998).

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