Photography Collectives and anti-racism in Peru and Argentina

Oliart, P; Triquell, A

doi:10.14296/919.9781908857729

Photography Collectives and anti-racism in Peru and Argentina

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Patricia Oliart

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Abstract

Placed at the crossroads between the arts, photojournalism and political activism, contemporary documentary photographers are producing and staging images that suggest the elaboration of renewed imaginaries of citizenship in Latin America. Organised in collectives using different forms of production and platforms to disseminate their work, these photographers evidence a high degree of reflexivity on their practice and social position, taking a critical stance against discriminatory racial relations and social injustice, and using their lenses to document the presence, concerns, struggles and lives of marginalised and emerging groups in urban spaces in their societies. This chapter examines anti-racist interventions by two photography collectives, one in Argentina, Colectivo Manifiesto and the other one in Peru, Colectivo Supay. Both collectives are socially diverse and typically outsiders to any specific identity or class based movement, but are critical of the current social and racial configurations in their societies, and use their photography to stir criticism or to destabilize prejudice or common racialized discriminatory assumptions about the ‘urban poor’. After presenting their interventions we will compare how they use photography to engage with anti-racist discourses and practices in both South American countries. Even though the formats, contents, and tone of Manifiesto and Supay’s interventions are not similar, members of both collectives belong to a generation of Latin Americans who see themselves as marked by the need to produce new narratives about democracy and citizenship in their societies after the return to democracy and the imposition of neoliberalism. Working in the area of cultural production, they disseminate ideas, aesthetic expressions and forms of working and living that are aimed at challenging the status quo and producing cultural and political change in their societies, for which current racial relations are deemed obsolete.