first season of photography / book by Jean-Marie Simon Guatemala still fresh wounds that were opened during the internal armed conflict. This is a topic that is usually addressed with some annoyance, as many think it is time to forgive, forget and move on, but generally, such samples of optimism take refuge in a deep and shameful ignorance of the events of these lands.
Openly seen, the country has sores smoking is customary disguise with makeup of the signing of the peace in 1996. And new generations tend to ignore details of that past. It is something of a sore body must continue its path, with gauze and bandages on his head, standing in the future. Naturally, the more damage he would sit on its own dust to lick their wounds, but we emphasize that progress is not necessarily ignored. And here's this book in the U.S. Jean-Marie Simon to illustrate a time when our country was flooded with blood, marking the direction in which we lost today, in disarray.
The author of Guatemala: Eternal spring, eternal tyranny, a book of photographs with notes on the history of his country, came at age 26. It was certainly a girl who matured by dint of being face to face with the wings of human evil deployed. Saw at first hand the anger of the death-bird pecking belly rubbed people and the crowds, which hovered between the torture of students, poor, innocent, and anyone that crossed the path of its beak and claw.
This, a true picture as grim as it was endorsed and supported by the U.S. Government, through its Department of State.
impressions of that period, captured with Olympus OM-1 and OM-2, with lenses 28 and 50 mm Kodak film. The results were shown in a first edition in 1988, in English (WW Norton & Company). This year is the English edition, with the support of several people and institutions, including the well known photographers and Andrew Daniel Chauche Asturias.
Today, it is relatively easy to stand and face, challenge and even contradict the president, the whole army and Defense Ministry, but these 145 images speak of a time when fear was erected on the nation as if the sun heating the roof. Under the sky, muttering a sorry people their dissatisfaction, many intellectuals were killed while others cheered. You can also now be easier to travel with a camera, portraying villages to military troops or generals bloodiest, is something that tourists usually do and some photographers to sell shirts, but what did Jean-Marie Simon, Since 1980, it was very unique. Secretly defied the laws of depravity. For taking those pictures could be accused of terrorism, to support the insurgency and so end his life in a tragic, humiliating and rather violent death, as did her friends.
reading his book, clear and direct (Anne style editing Pamela Escobar Paul) - describes what is being researched by the author and displays the images you took from 1980 to 1987, the account, looks at an inhuman horde involved in genocide, with names and surnames. Only the government of Lucas Garcia, to cite one example refreshes the author citing Amnesty International, was more human rights violator of Idi Amin in Uganda.
His way of presenting such disasters makes wounds are understood from a historical perspective and social that the reader will look upon the past cannibal and generates many of the current political and social infections.
Jean-Marie Simon was able to develop into adulthood without any problem from the 26años in his native United States, land of hamburgers and overweight children, but took a chance to collect evidence during one of the darkest days of Guatemala. These documents give shape to this book as an anthropologist evidence innate without that title, but with camera in hand and courage in the heart.
For our part, predicts the popularity of the volume, it is very valuable and must overcome the fact that, for now, and paradoxically, because its price is affordable only to middle socioeconomic groups and hegemonic. Ana Martinez de Zárate
shares with us in the following two pages, he did an interview a few days ago, via Skype, Jean-Marie Simon, who is in Washington DC where he lives, and soon cease to come to present this edition of Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny, Book weighing 40 years in its 272 pages.
