So That All Shall Know/Para que todos lo sepan (review)

The images are familiar: a series of four black and white photographs; in each photograph is a bare-chested man with what appears at first to be angel's wings. Upon closer inspection, the wings are formed by a human scapula. The first figure covers his eyes, the next one covers his mouth, a third image his ears, and a final image final angel cups his hands around a wide-mouthed silent scream. As the cover to the Guatemalan Archbishop Juan Gerardi's 1998 inquiry into human rights violations, Guatemala: Nunca más, Daniel Hernández-Salazar's Esclarecimiento polyptych demands attention and issues forth a call to action. Hernández-Salazar's new book, edited by Oscar Iván Maldonado, builds upon the photographer's wide audience and broadly interrogates the role of culture and art in social justice.

At once an attractive art book and scholarly text, this work stands out in both form and function. Through documentary and aesthetic photography, Hernández-Salazar demonstrates that art and its placement in space is itself a form of activism –visibility and dignity lie at the heart of this project. To contextualize Hernández-Salazar's work, editor Maldonado has thoughtfully selected a collection of essays to alternate with photographic portfolios. Together, Hernández-Salazar's photography and essays from leading Latin Americanists argue that art is a crucial component of social struggle.

Following a foreword by Guatemalan Nobel Prize Laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum and a brief introduction, the text commences the first of three portfolios, Daniel Hernández-Salazar, Photojournalist. In this collection Hernández-Salazar contrasts indigenous femininity with military masculinity, most poignantly envisioned in the photograph, "Clash of Two Worlds, 1492-1992," where indigenous women and children of Cajolá collide with the National Police. The portfolio includes both black and white and color photographs, each shot in a documentary style. Again, Hernández-Salazar creates a sense of collision, as black and white photographs of disappeared and assassinated Guatemalans (bearers of the past) are depicted with their young sons and multiple exhumations (bearers of the future).

The second portfolio, entitled Eros + Thanatos, marks an aesthetic turn in Hernández Salazar's work. The dominant subject of this collection is a single male nude on black and white film. The still life image is contrasted with chilling close-up photographs of skull and bone fragments, culled from exhumed bodies. This second collection, while created with aesthetic rather than documentary methods including digital multimedia, gallery installations, and multiple exposures, remains committed to Hernández-Salazar's political project, belying such simplistic distinction between aesthetic and documentary photography.

The final collection, Memory of an Angel, depicts the installation and slow destruction of the popular "Angel of Memory" image in a variety of temporal and geographic spaces, from the western wall of Army Headquarters in Guatemala City (where the image was quickly removed) to a Picasso sculpture in front of Chicago's courthouse. The result is a visual tension between the black and white, aesthetic style of the "Angel of Memory" and the full color surroundings in which it has been installed. Characteristic of Hernández-Salazar's work, this tension demands that the viewer reconcile the past with the present, and as the installation moves farther from Guatemala, that the viewer reconcile the comfort of "here" with the tremendous trauma located "there."

The collection of engaging bilingual essays placed between each photographic portfolio develops the analytical aspect of the text. The first short essay, written by historical geographer George Lovell poetically introduces the photographer's work. In "Angels, Conquests, and Memory," Lovell narrates his first viewings of Hernández-Salazar's striking polyptych, introducing the reader to the profound impact and broad reach of the photographer's work. Guatemalan scholar of Central American photography Miguel Flores Castellanos...