Archivo Muerto

  Marijuana dealers (originally captioned cocained dealers in El Espacio)

The dilemma of the archive is how do you make sense of it. You can regurgitate it in its original form, you can recontextualise it through new captions, editiing or fabrication, you can reconceptualise it through the terms of how you make and show it. You can add voice,  narrative structure, voice to it, you can accentuate certain elements, ignore certain elements, turn chaos into order, or order into chaos. You can bring it forward in time or move it back in time. An archive is like anything, a movable feast. You can do what you will with it, just do it with a straight face and people will believe you.  That's the secret of the archive.


In Archivo Muerto, Andrés Orjuela has worked  on original press prints (which were saved by collectors from recycling for paper) from what was the archive of Colombia's El Espacio, a newspaper that for five decades published bloodstained gore from the 'prehistory' of the drug trafficking that has been immortalised, celebrated and glamourised in the Netflix series Pablo Escobar (which I haven't seen). 

The glamourisation of Escobar's a sore point with Orjuela. He believes it whitewashes the drug lord  (even phrase like drug lord, or drug baron confer a nobility that shields the reality of Escobar's crimes) and conceals the political and economic realities of the cocaine trade; Netflix, says Orjuela, and all the broadcasters and publishers who are involved in the glorification of Escobar '..maliciously conceal the relations among the CIA, the mafia and the dark regimes from Central and South America.'

So for Archivo Muerto, the dilemma was how can you remove the glamour, the spectacle, the impact of an archive which is .designed to have glamour, spectacle and impact. Oh, and gore... The black and white pictures which Orjuela uses in Archivo Muerto were colourised, all the more to emphasise the blood splatters. Topless women and blood, that was the order of the day for the back pages of El Espacio. How do you make sense of that.

Orjuela doesn't ignore the blood. It's there but is limited. His selection of images is designed to show the social exclusion, the creeping politicisation of the drug trade, the police brutality, the prehistory days of smuggling marijuana to the United States and beyond, the way drugs crept into law, into politics, into the very bones of civil society. And with that, there's an undercurrent of the social failures of Colombia to create alternative possibilities.  

It's an attempt to take it all down a notch in other words, to present a human face to trafficking that has some more subtlety than the sledgehammer machismo-cheerleading approach of a hyper-celebrated cartel of psychopaths and thugs.

You see that in the picture of a marijuana smuggler. He's standing in front of a blackboard, he's wearing a (colourised) brown jacket, his hands are behind his back (handcuffed presumably).  and in front of him is a sea-green expanse of marijuana. His face is sunken, sharp features on a head hung low, a picture that serves the function of shame. 

The pictures are reproduced at actual size, with the reverse of the page containing the original captioning and printing instructions. There are mugshots, covered bodies, and carbombings. There are minot criminals, delinquents and drug mules. A young man called Luis Aldana gets a kicking from the police for 'trying to escape'. We see him again later, lying on the ground with a companion whose blood-filled mouth is open in agony, the shiny boots of the police stretched out beside him. 

This picture is printed on a fullsize page. We see his face contorted in pain. Slipped into the middle of the pages are smaller images, folded over so we see the captions but not the face. These are of more serious criminals, criminals who are being 'punished' by scale in the design of the book. 'The Colombian criminal... does not deserve to be shown in the same way as the rest (the most representative of the colombian history),' says the book's designer, Veronica Fieiras. 'They are criminals that don't represent the country and they have to be "punished" in some way. Thats why the picture of Gacha (the closest person to Pablo Escobar) is upside down in the book.'

At times the book does look cinematic; the man in the back of a police car with blood stains painted onto his shirt looks like a still from some South American film noir, while the sailor deported from the USA for smuggling marijuana, all beard and sunglasses, is an advert for the 70s. That cinematic quality says something about the relationship between fiction, cinema, crime and photography. They do not stand alone but each is influenced by the other. That relationship is integrated into the sequencing of the book, a narrative that is fed by the captions and leads out into the broader social considerations Orjuela has highlighted.

The book itself feels fantastic. It's cardboard covered with black paper and a red trim, ring bound, the leaves holepunched and loose inside, like an archive but not quite. 

And that's what it is. Not quite an archive, not quite a redefining of history, more of a place where the tectonic plates of how images, history and mythology grind up against each other. Archivo Muerto asks questions which can't really be answered but it does in quite a transparent way. 

It's an archival treatment that brings order out of chaos, but it's an order that is chaotic in nature, that asks us to examine the interconnectedness of things, the way crime ties into civil society and our daily life, and the extent to which we avoid taking responsibility for that, to which we are blind to that even when it is there right in front of our eyes.






Read about about how the pictures for Archivo Muerto were rescued from destruction here. 

See Andrés Orjuela' previous book, Muestrario, here. This book is a re-representation of blood in Mexican newspapers. 

Read my review of James Mollison's Pablo Escobar here. 







Veronica Fieiras and Chaco Books will be showing work as part of the Panoramic Arts Festival in Granollers, near Barcelona from 27th - 30th September. Free entry for everything which is the way it should be.

Chaco's next book is  "SOBRE LA RESISTENCIA DE LOS CUERPOS" from Mexican author Jose Luis Cuevas in co-edition with Cabeza de Chorlito

Manchuria, The West Bank and School Playgrounds

Noriko was a Japanese student I once taught, but unlike Michiko (who you can read about in yesterday's post) she came from a position of privileged ignorance. She was lovely and kind and was part of a fantastic class that had Japanese, Greek, Iranian and Chinese students in it. Everybody was incredibly smart, tolerant and generous to each other and Noriko was at the heart of all that kindness.

Then one day, one of the Chinese students was talking about China and where her parents came from in the far north-west, in Manchuria. And that's when Noriko piped up. "Oh, that's Manchuko," she said. "My grandfather was the top general there."

And then there was silence. The Japanese committed horrendous crimes in China including biological and chemical testing as well as having camps where humans were experimented on. This was like happily telling a Jew or a Czech that your grandfather is Dr Mengele or Reinhard Heydrich and expecting them to be happy about it.

But Noriko didn't know this. And this was understood. And so for the next few days, the Chinese student would take her Noriko away and give her a new interpretation of both Japanese and her own family history. And Noriko listened and took it all in, wiser but sadder.

It was a lesson in tolerance and the ability to listen to and understand something very difficult to hear (that had possibly been nestling in the back of Noriko's mind). And maybe it was only something that could happen outside the heated environments of accusation and denial that you might have in China or Japan.

I often think of Noriko and her miraculous ability to grasp something that must have been so personally shattering. I wonder at the ability of both Noriko and the Chinese student to engage with each other on terms that lie outside the usual political discourse, on terms that you will never see in the news or on television.

And sometimes I connect it to something happening in the news, something where the two sides are so diametrically opposed that even as an outsider, one is infected by the driven bile and hatred of one side to the other, bile and hatred that appears to be ubiquitous and all encompassing, but that still has little chinks in, little gaps where there is a willingness to understand and take responsibility for one's own failings and not just blame others, where the humanity of the opposing party is recognised in at least some form - and because of it becomes less of an opposing party.




One place where the Noriko homily pops up is with Israel and Palestine. I don't know that much about these countries ( and Palestine was recognised as a state in the UK this week) and I have limited sympathy for Palestine and even more limited sympathy for Israel. Sometimes it is hard to get beyond the hypocrisy, cruelty and backwardness of both sides.

But maybe that's because when I talk about both sides, I talk about the leadership one sees on TV, or the despicable spokesman who pops up every few years to justify war crimes and murder, or the police state that imposes a culture of violence on its people.

On the few occasions that I see people or words that go beyond this (albeit engrained) rhetoric of opposition and enmity, then I identify more. It might be reading the Fuck Everyone statement by Gaza youth. It goes like this

"Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community!

"We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in...

Or it might be watching a film like Lemon Tree, an Israeli-made film that details both the injustices of the West Bank occupation but through the distant relationship between the wife of the Israeli Defence Secretary and a Palestinian lemon farmer.

But the trouble is it's Israel and it's Palestine and so not everything is so illuminating. And that's where we come back to photography and Nick Waplington's brilliantly photographed Settlement.

This is a book that Waplington says shows images '...created between 2008 and 2013, when I photographed over 350 distinct settlements, from populous cities like Ariel to tiny outposts made up of a few caravans. The exact number of settlements cannot be determined with accuracy, as both construction and demolition take place regularly throughout the region. In general, however, the presence of Jewish settlers in the West Bank is entrenched and their building projects continue with the support of the state of Israel.'

No kidding! Settlement is taking a solid, objective tone. Waplington is not trying to untangle the politics of occupation and settlement, he's simply showing it. And there are maps and references to back this up. Settlement is what it is, nothing more and nothing less. Except of course it's not.



Is it possible in such a charged landscape to be neutral, objective? Is there such a thing? I don't think so  but I think the idea of objectivity may be a central element to the book. And that's what makes it so very, very interesting and so very, very difficult.

It's a fantastic book; the landscapes are charged, and the simple family portraits of settlers come with a subtext, a history and a projected future. Some people find them sympathetic, portraits of family who gain strength from each other and do not look outwards.




picture above by James Mollison

 But I didn't get that feeling whatsoever. I found them hard and brutalised, in the same way I found James Mollison's picture (see above) of a Palestinian school in the West Bank hard and brutalised. I don't know if this is coming from my own very limited background knowledge of the West Bank and what is happening there now, or if Waplington is putting something into the pictures. I think it's probably the former because Waplington does have a sympathy towards the settlers. That might come out to one audience but to another (including this viewer), the portraits are anything but sympathetic.

What it amounts to is quite devastating; a folding over of landscape into power, of religion into family, of control and dominion that combines those elements of pioneering farming with annexation and occupation.

There's no middle ground here though, The people who are photographed are single-minded and will not budge. That's why Waplington has made it in the way he has I guess; as a mapping, of the land and of the people who live there. The future is bleak and it does not blink. Unless you think differently, and then it's all bright and lovely, with a little bit of struggle along the way; The One-State Utopia?

Facial Recognition and Mishka Henner

So I've been writing about Mishka Henner and his latest book, Less Americains for the BJP. It's the one where Henner takes the 83 images of Robert Frank's classic and then deletes part of them. There is so much going on in what he is deleting that I've gone from Blank Space to White Space to Negative Space and then come back to the hair and the hats that he leaves in and the faces that he takes out.

He takes all the faces out, doesn't leave one - and in a strange way that ties in to Facial Recognition - and all the apps, 3D imaging, tagging, social networking and surveillance that comes with it.

The top picture is from an early Facial Recognition paper by Richard Phillips, the findings of which say that essentially we recognise heads better than faces and the complete head+face set about two times better than either one on its own.

Which leads on to so much photographic work, but especially Ken Ohara's One, a series where only the face is shown - everything else is lost and as a result people start looking the same, especially when you look at the book where 500 portraits come one after the other. It's often said that one shows how much we look the same, but rather it should be how much we see each other as the same when we take away the hair, the body, the clothes. It's about how people see, not what people look like.

James Mollison used a similar strategy for  James and Other Apes, but here the apes start looking different, they become more recognisable when stripped of the rest of their heads, or perhaps just because they are from different species. It's the opposite of the cross-race effect, the idea that one recognises people of the same ethnic group better than those of a different ethnic background.

And then there are the many people who can't recognise faces at all, who have prosopagnosia - Chuck Close is one of them, that's why he paints the way he paints, and so is Oliver Sacks.

James Mollison and Nuruddin Farah

I enjoyed seeing James Mollison talking about his Dadaab refugee camp (population 370,000 and rising) pictures and the portraits he made of Somalis in the camp - all with an Avedonesque white backdrop to isolate the figures. Which reminds me of Paul Close's fabulous Snakebox Odyssey - even if that is completely different.

Mollison touches on why he has a white backdrop and raises questions of if we should show the normality, show the horror, show the backdrop, don't show the backdrop? Which way should it go? Or should it go all ways?

Show the complexity maybe? I liked seeing the camp best of all in the video, the shops, the restaurant and the guy who was getting married. What is his story I wonder? What happens at night, what are the politics of the camp? Does anyone ever leave?

And at the same time I'm enjoying Nuruddin Farah's tremendous From a Crooked Rib, a Somali man's eye view of a Somali woman's eye view.

James Mollison: The Disciples

James Mollison's hilarious series on music fans, The Disciples(you can probably guess who the people here are going to see) , can be seen in quiz form at The Guardian.


They will also be on show, with his fantastic Ape portraits, at Hasted Hunt Gallery.

Everybody's got something to hide...

Roger Ballen regards his distance from the sea of images that wash over us as part of his success at finding his own visual voice. Connected to that, Alessandra Sanguinetti notes that it is not enough to make good images, that she has to make great images.

How many great images are made though and what constitutes their greatness?

How many images will we see this weekend - in newspapers, books, magazines, on screen or posted in the street? How many will we remember when Monday comes around, how many are worth remembering?

With that perennial thought flowering once again, it's back to animals. Apes and monkeys are (after kids juxtaposed with the spoils of the day's hunting trip) one of the favourite subjects of photographers who shoot animals. Best of the monkey men for me is James Mollison. His James and Other Apes features portraits of chimps, orang-utans, bonobos and gorillas - all done in Ken Ohara (I still can't believe he's not Irish!) close-up - which, in opposition to Ohara's One pictures, accentuates the apes' differences and their individuality.

Apes look pretty good in a photograph, but monkey films, God help Us! The one exception is King Kong, especially the original, co-directed by Merian C.Cooper. Cooper was inspired to make his film by the island of Komodo in Indonesia - his first idea for the film was to take a gorilla to Komodo and have it fight a Komodo dragon to the death!

Partly because of King Kong, I have always had a bit of an obsession with Komodo - so tying in with the dead animal theme, here's a picture from Komodo.

Pablo Escobar - James Mollison

From Deep Politics to Deep Photography. James Mollison latest offering is Pablo Escobar, a multi-faceted view of the life of Pablo Escobar. It's a great book with an engaging text and has some fabulous images from a variety of archives, including this one of Escobar with his wife. Here's a piece I did for the lovely folk at the BJP.



Pablo Escobar

A Myth in His Own Making

by Colin Pantall

“As a child, he loved nature and animals,” says Dona Hermilda, the mother of Columbian drug dealer, Pablo Escobar. “He loved trees from a very early age. He nearly cried when his father had to chop them down.”

Pablo Escobar was not so sensitive when it came to people. His rise from small-time gangster to the world’s biggest drug dealer was accompanied by a level of violence that brought Colombia to a state verging on civil war. He was responsible for killing half the nation’s Supreme Court and blowing an airliner out of the sky, he murdered politicians, journalists and police at will and transformed his home town of Medellin into the world’s most dangerous city. In 1991, he walked out of a prison he had built for himself and spent the next 2 years on the run. He escaped over 14,000 police raids before his death in 1993, shot by Colombian police on the rooftop of a safe house in Medellin.

James Mollison’s latest work, Pablo Escobar, is a visual examination of the life and times of Escobar. Tying in images from a variety of archives with a text, the book provides a visual overview of  a man who was once America’s Public Enemy Number One.

“I was in Colombia and I was doing this Narcotecture project,” says Mollison. “I got excited about it because of the idea and name. People would tell me about buildings made from drug money which had swimming pools instead of balconies, but then I got there and there would be nothing interesting to photograph. The buildings were boring.”

“I was depressed about it, but I was photographing in Medellin and was in the process of going to an old Escobar office block called Edifacio Monaco - which only confirmed that the project didn’t work. The building was occupied by Columbia’s public prosecution service, I was apprehended by security and had my camera confiscated. I was taken to meet the boss whose office was in Escobar’s old bedroom. He was so excited by this and brought out this whole book of photographs. Seeing this record really threw me because other books on Pablo Escobar have a US perspective but the images I saw were gritty and not glamorous. I wanted to know how Escobar had got into this position.”

Mollison returned to Columbia 6 months later and set about searching for visual records of Escobar’s life, not an easy task considering many pictures had disappeared or been destroyed - Escobar paid the police to destroy their files and the mass media were not much help either. Most journalists who were brave enough to tell the truth about Escobar were killed. Escobar closed down Colombia’s second biggest daily, El Espectador, by killing its editor, bombing its offices and forcing advertisers to withdraw their patronage. However, the bravery of El Espectador’s journalists shows in the archive they held on the activities of Escobar and his associates.

The El Espectador archive forms the heart of Mollison’s book, its black and white images detailing the height of Escobar’s sociopathic terror against Colombian society.

“One thing I came to understand was Pablo was obsessed with power,” says Mollison. “He was a classic gangster. He wasn’t really a drug smuggler, but he was born in the right place at the right time and there was an opportunity for him to do what he did.”

Images show the rise of Colombia’s cocaine industry in the early 1980s, a time when Escobar’s exports to the United States were earning him tens of millions of dollars a month. In 1982, Escobar’s obsession with power caused him to make the mistake that would ultimately lead to his downfall - he entered Colombian politics. Disturbed by the open influence of drug money on Colombian society,  government minister Lara Bonilla attacked Escobar in congress. “The violence started at that time,” says Colombian congressman, Alberto Villamizar. “Lara Bonilla was fighting them and they killed him and until Escobar was dead it was just a war.”

The El Espectador archive shows this war - the bombs, the killings, the mayhem and the continuing fight to extradite drug dealers to the United States. Police archives show the slow victory of the authorities - one shocking image shows the corpse of Gacha, a kingpin in the Medellin Cartel, his skull blown off, one eye staring to the heavens above. Other images show the victims of the death squads who operated against Escobar and his supporters, while colour pictures of Escobar’s death in 1993 come from the personal album of Hugo Martinez, the police officer who hunted him down.

“Escobar’s story is surrounded by so much myth,” says Mollison, “so we decided to let the people speak and tell their own story.”

So we see  pictures of his rise to power in the late 70s, informal snaps taken by his personal photographer, El Chino, and Mollison’s own pictures of the landscapes and people who survived Escobar’s war on Colombia.

These images provide a different perspective on Escobar and together with the interviews with those close to him - his family, his minders, his hit men - they provided a more three-dimensional view of a man who was mythologized to a point where he was America’s Top International Bogeyman - a position since occupied by Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

Most interesting are El Chino’s photographs. These show Escobar the family man. One series of images shows him at his daughter’s 12th birthday party, just after Escobar had become number one on the FBI’s most wanted list. He’s on the run, but we see him dancing and drinking and presenting his daughter with a white horse. The final image shows him sitting deep in thought, a bizarre cocktail of dry ice and cordial foaming in front of him. “That is my favourite photograph of him,” says El Chino, “because in the middle of the party he is left thinking and that is him... He was not a happy man.”

We see Escobar’s country retreat, Hacienda Napoles, resplendent with its own private zoo, and the prison Escobar built for himself (and walked out of) as part of a surrender deal to avoid extradition. Rough colour shots show the sex toys found in the prison and the football pitch where Columbia’s most successful team  played Escobar’s prison side. Escobar’s side won.

Mollison’s provides the images for the aftermath of Escobar’s life. There are interiors of homes built by Escobar for the poor of Medellin - their ramshackle but immaculate interiors decorated by  images of Jesus, Mary and Pablo Escobar. A portrait of Escobar’s mother shows eyes that perhaps saw, heard and spoke more evil than she would have us believe, while a searing portrait of Popeye, one of Escobar’s most trusted lieutenants, shows a face that seems almost incapable of showing any remorse or pity or pain.

The artwork of German Arrubla recreates Escobar as a kitsch Jesus/Che figure, complete with camouflage robes and a bleeding heart, while the personal album of US DEA agent, Javier Pena, shows Pena ( a Borat-lookalike with crimpy hair and big tash) posing with the guns, gold and drugs seized by the police on raids on the Medellin Cartel’s properties.

Mollison was only able to research Escobar because he has become a mythic figure. “He’s become someone you can talk about because he’s the bad guy,” says Mollison. “If I had asked about the people controlling the drug trade today, that would have been different. The new guys have learnt from Escobar not to be so flamboyant, to be more low key. In Escobar’s time, if somebody got killed they would be dumped on the street. Now they get buried instead, but it’s not that different.”

Mollison’s Pablo Escobar is both a simple and a complex character. Simple, because he was essentially a gangster, complex because his violence was on such a grand, almost legendary, scale. Mollison’s text draws a picture of Escobar that acts as a primer on the politics of the drugs trade and how money, power and law influence each other both domestically and internationally. Mollison doesn’t make any solid conclusions about anything. Instead, he poses questions that remain unanswered, and lie awake in one’s mind long after one has read the engaging and accessible text. The effect is compounded by the images ( and the wide range of sources they come from) that contradict and undermine each other and add to the idea of Pablo Escobar as a myth in his own, and many other people’s making.

“He was just like any other bandit,” says Hugo Martinez, the police chief ultimately responsible for Escobar’s death. “I have always put a lot of the blame on the gringos - the agencies, the press that built him up on the world stage as a Mafioso who was very important... They fanned the flames. He thought that he was very important and started believing that he had the right to kill presidential candidates - to do anything he wanted.”