American Anthropologist Vol. 113, No. 1 March 2011 Visual Anthropology
Photographic Books of the Chiapas Photography Project
Ixim – Maíz – Corn. Photographs: Emiliano Guzmán Meza; Text: Carlota Duarte and Emiliano Guzmán Meza. México: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Archivo Fotográfico Indigena, 2004. 80 pp.
Carnaval in Tenejapa: A Tzeltal Community in Chiapas. Photographs: Petul Hernández Guzmán; Text: Carlota Duarte, Petul Hernández Guzmán, Luisa Maffi, and Jeroen van der Zalm. Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Archivo Fotográfico Indigena, 2004. 80 pp.
Creencias de Nuestros Antepasados. Photographs: Maruch Sántiz Gómez; Text: Carlota Duarte, Hermann Bellinghausen, Gabriela Vargas Cetina, and Maruch Sántiz Gómez. Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Archivo Fotográfico Indigena, 1998. 108 pp.
Mi hermanita Cristina, una niña chamula. Photographs: Xunka’ López Díaz; Text: Lourdes de León Pasquel and Xunka’ López Díaz. Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Archivo Fotográfico Indigena, 2000. 80 pp.
Posh, a Traditional Liquor from Chiapas. Photographs: Genaro Sántiz Gómez; Text: Carlota Duarte, Juan Miguel Blasco López, Maruch Sántiz Gomez, and Génaro Sántiz Gómez. Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Archivo Fotográfico Indigena, 2005. 80 pp.
Carlos D. Torres – University of Colorado at Boulder
The Chiapas Photography Project (CPP) was founded in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Mexico, in 1992 by the Mexican American artist and photographer Carlota Duarte, with the aim of providing access to photographic technologies for indigenous peoples from the region (Guzmán Meza and Duarte 2004:5). Since 1992, over 200 indigenous people from ten ethnic groups have participated in the project. With institutional help from the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, and grant support from the Ford Foundation, Duarte and the participating indigenous men and women have been able to create the Indigenous Photography Archive (AFI).
Over the years, Carlota Duarte, who holds a salaried position as the director of the CPP, has encouraged Maya participants to choose subject matter that resonates with them at a personal level. Each photographer’s vision is part of an individual and Maya aesthetic that encompasses home, culture, and life experience, all shaping the construction and form of the photographic collections. This review of five books of photography published by CPP represents the work of five different Maya photographers.
SACRED CONNECTIONS, EARTH AND SEED: IXIM (CORN) BY EMILIANO GUZMÁN MEZA
Ixim, Emiliano Guzman Meza’s photo book about corn, like many of the books of AFI, projects a personal vista of contemporary Maya life in the Chiapas highlands. Guzmán Meza’s work encapsulates the many significations of corn as a potent symbol of Maya folklore as well as a contemporary agricultural commodity and practice; as a politicized food staple but also as an emblematic icon for the Maya conception of the sacred link between consumption and regeneration.
In two still-life close-up images of corn, Guzmán Meza photographs different varieties lined up within the same photographic frame: one depicts the corncobs on the ground, the soil and roots of the background emphasizing their connection to the earth; the other is shot against a plain white cloth, framed more as scientific specimens (Guzmán Meza 2004:77). Indeed, this oscillation between the traditional, mythical significance of corn and the more scientific, anthropological accounts of the increasingly mechanized means of its production and consumption can be seen to characterize both Guzmán Meza’s deployment of the camera and his textual accounts.
ON ETHNOGRAPHIC FIDELITY: THE WORK OF PETUL HERNÁNDEZ GUZMÁN
Petul Hernández Guzmán’s Carnaval in Tenejapa: A Tzeltal Community in Chiapas intentionally reaches beyond a book of captured images. Petul was born in a hamlet near Tenejapa called Ok’och, near the Tenejapa town center, and was introduced to ethnographic field methods by an anthropologist named Luisa Maffi who was doing dissertation fieldwork when she hired Petul as a translator and interpreter. Among all the CPP participants, Hernández Guzmán is arguably the photographer who identifies most strongly with the role of native historian or autoethnographer; his book, the outcome of six years of meticulous research, is a densely ethnographic tribute to Tenejapa’s Carnaval festivities. The vivid scarlet colors of the ceremonial flags and huipiles make the fiesta among the most colorful celebrations of a colorful area. Petul chooses to take the viewer through the 13 days of the festival, from the presentation of the flags to the ceremonial sacrifice of a bull and distribution of its meat.
His work offers an elucidatory means to explore the specific uses and significance of photography in this labor of cultural preservation—as well as the relationship between image and text, a question of central concern to many of the CPP photographers. His desire to convey his research both to his community and an uninitiated outside audience frequently seems to locate him at an ambivalent boundary: both passionate spokesperson for Tenejapans and subtly apart, as self-reflexive academic and documentarian.
BETWEEN ART AND ETHNOGRAPHY: MARUCH SÁNTIZ GÓMEZ’S CREENCIAS
Like Petul Hernández Guzmán, Maruch Sántiz Gómez is motivated by a passionate commitment to preserve and promote indigenous cultural heritage, and she too arrived at the CPP with considerable experience of cultural revitalization work, having been a member of the indigenous writers’ cooperative Sna Jtz’ibajom. Creencias, like much of the photography of AFI, intently combines visual communication and textual communication. Every picture is part of an extended story, a cultural matrix of ancestral, communal, familial associations. In Maruch’s photos, “each thing has a life of its own … a dense presence in things among things” (Bellinghausen in Sántiz Gómez et al 1998:19).
The book’s dominant aesthetic is the still life, with the majority of images focusing on a single, inanimate object. As in the case of the creencia (belief) relating to the bejao leaf or chicken’s feet, objects are often centrally positioned within the frame and photographed from above, the focus squarely on the object itself. The rich textures and tonal contrasts of Sántiz Gómez’s photographic work entice the viewer to dwell on the physical contours of the objects as they are captured on film. However, the artifact’s frozen divorce from its social context within Sántiz Gómez’s austere compositional aesthetic exists in a delicate dialogue with its enlivenment within the juxtaposed textual accounts of the attendant creencia, relocating the isolated objects within a dense network of social relations.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In the work of the two CPP participants, the photographers deliberately deploy their camera in the service of their communities, albeit in very different ways. Other participants, however, use photography as a vehicle to reflect on the shifting relationship between self and community, operating at the interface between the autobiographic and the ethnographic. This dynamic is particularly striking in the work of two photographers, Genaro Sántiz Gómez and Xunka’ López Díaz, who mobilize photography to reflect on the complexities of their individual experiences of a turbulent period of rapid sociocultural change in many highland communities.
The work of one of the female becarios (scholars), Xunka’ López Díaz, has the most pronounced autobiographical voice of any of the participants. Xunka’s family decided to leave the Tzotzil village of San Juan Chamula and moved to one of the peripheral settlements of San Cristóbal. Xunka’s sister was born after religious expulsions subsided. Mi hermanita Cristina tells of the transformative potential of the Maya women of Chiapas, who have had to endure economic hardship and had to change their roles within their families and within Maya communities. Her text conforms to the conventions of the teleological autobiography, unfolding chronologically to chart her parents’ arrival in San Cristóbal in 1975 and their struggle as a family to adapt to the very different context of the city. Her story ends with a description of the very different life of the author’s sister Cristina, who is able to enjoy an unburdened childhood. López Díaz’s photography is devoted to exploring Cristina’s journey of acquiring her family’s Chamulan heritage and making it her own in the displaced environment of the streets of San Cristóbal.
Posh, like all of the books of AFI, begins with a prologue written by cultural contributors; they provide exegesis, setting the historical stage in, this case, for Genaro Sántiz Gómez’ photographs and testimony. The prologues are either written by Carlota Duarte or by Mexican academics and supporters of CPP. “Posh is a distillate that derives from the fermentation of white sugar, brown sugar, and bran (used as a catalyst)” (Miguel Blasco in Sántiz Gómez 2005:54). Posh also contains a reproduction of a roundtable discussion between members of CPP about the significance of the traditional alcohol that has long had a central role in the cultural and ceremonial life in indigenous communities. Sántiz Gómez recreates a sense of a rich familial tradition of oral history, handed down through the generations and transcribed textually in his recounting of his father’s story of his childhood working in the posh factory. As in other CPP publications, the author does not shy away from presenting the harsher aspects of life in indigenous communities: the narrative speaks of the painful conditions endured in the production and transportation of posh and the violence that mars life in many indigenous communities.
Sántiz Gómez’s photography also has a strong experimental dimension, suggesting the importance for him of photography as a means of self-expression. His exploration of the expressive possibilities of photography is evident in images that experiment with light and motion. For example, in an evocative color photograph inside the Cruztón church, the author uses a long shutter speed to recreate the candles in elongated streams of light, complementing the incense-filled, hazy atmosphere.
The photos of CPP create a unique countervisual to the photographs of Gertrude Blom of the mid–20th-century Lacandon Maya—and of external imaging of Maya by Westerners in general. The photographs of CPP members reference the internal and external dialogue of the Maya themselves, of the “once” ethnographic subject turned auto-ethnographer.
The books are an especially valuable resource in any instructional direction that seeks to include indigenous self-expression. Subjects and subject matter in the photographs are artfully and strategically composed in place, arranged to convey directed messages. In the new renaissance of highland Maya small-media production, the photographic books of CPP create important vistas into the realms of contemporary Maya experience, vistas that have finally emerged into the foreground. (For more information, see http://www.chiapasphoto.org.)