Brutal, vibrant and artistic: capturing the soul of Latin America in 100 pictures | Photography

Its tumultuous previous, marked by massacres, slavery, violent domination, coups d’état, revolutions and uprisings, typically overshadows one other narrative of Latin America: that of a vibrant, culturally wealthy area the place artwork, creativity and solidarity maintain a central place in society.

Throughout its post-Columbian historical past – the interval after Christopher Columbus’s arrival within the Americas in 1492 – Latin America has grappled with the stress between subjugation to colonial and imperial powers, resistance and the pursuit of independence.

This deeper, extra subtle historical past – much less outlined by institutional disaster – now finds visible expression in História da América Latina em 100 Fotografias (History of Latin America in 100 Photographs), the most recent work by Paulo Antonio Paranaguá.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948, the journalist and historian makes use of pictures as threads weaving collectively a transnational narrative of the continent.

The son of a diplomat, Paranaguá grew up in Buenos Aires and Madrid, studying Spanish earlier than Portuguese and absorbing early classes in defying dictatorship. As a young person beneath General Franco, he learn clandestine newspapers from exiled republicans in Tangier.

Back in Brazil, he started finding out social sciences earlier than shifting to Leuven in Belgium and at last to Paris in 1968, drawn by its radical, mental ferment. At Nanterre University, he crossed paths with Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the longer term Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, becoming a member of the May 1968 protests that formed his later activism in a Trotskyist group, the Fourth International.

That militancy took Paranaguá again to Latin America, the place in 1975 he was imprisoned for 2 years by Argentina’s dictatorship. Stripped of his passport by Brazil’s navy regime, he escaped with assist from his French contacts, gaining refugee standing and returning house solely after Brazil’s 1979 amnesty.

Paranaguá started as a photographer in 1968, then joined the newspaper Jornal do Brasil as its Paris correspondent, later working for Radio France Internationale and at last for Le Monde as editor for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Alongside journalism, he turned a number one scholar of Latin American cinema, publishing Cinema na América Latina: Longe de Deus e Perto de Hollywood in 1985 and modifying volumes on the area’s cultural historical past.

In 2017, he co-authored History of Brazil in 100 Photographs. For this new e book, he labored alone. “I appreciate collective work,” he says, “but to tell the story of Latin America, I needed more control.”

Rejecting nationwide narratives, Paranaguá builds a related world historical past of the area, masking Indigenous peoples, colonisation, slavery and migration – even the non‑Latin Caribbean, from Dutch Suriname to British Belize.

“National histories, even those of small countries, are inadequate to explain Latin America’s evolution,” he says. “Connected and global history challenge the old paradigm.”

Photography, he says, expands historical past past politics. “I wanted to develop, alongside political history, the cultural, social and anthropological history of Latin America – all the creativity that defined its identity.”

Drawing on archaeological discoveries, Paranaguá revisits the Olmec, Aztec, Inca and Guarani civilisations and the nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century archaeologists who helped forge nationwide pictures in Mexico and Peru.

He additionally avoids cliches: the Mexican Revolution is seen by pictures of feminine troopers slightly than the standard portraits of Pancho Villa or Zapata; the Trujillo dictatorship within the Dominican Republic is portrayed by the murdered Mirabal sisters slightly than the ‘Generalísimo’ himself.

Alongside the nice upheavals – wars, revolutions, dictatorships – seem peripheral but revealing topics. Frida Kahlo poses for American photographers, crafting her worldwide persona; Wifredo Lam hyperlinks surrealism with Afro‑Cuban tradition. The Chaco warfare (1932‑35) is documented by the German photographer Willi Ruge in trench scenes that echo these of the primary world warfare.

The e book’s actual treasure lies in Paranaguá’s archive work. The picture of Che Guevara, after the Argentinian revolutionary’s physique had been placed on show in Vallegrande, Bolivia, reproduced right here got here from Buenos Aires, not Bolivia. “Some archives have been digitised, but most remain in uneven conditions,” he says.

His pictures join Latin America’s previous to its current, revealing how fascist concepts, inequality and violence endure. A 1938 Nazi rally celebrating the Anschluss at Luna Park in Buenos Aires, full of swastikas, mirrors the far-right resurgence throughout the area.

“These moments help us understand the present,” Paranaguá says. “Today’s far-right movements are not unprecedented – they echo our past.”

National independence, he argues, didn’t free Latin Americans from entrenched elites. “At the heart of Latin American societies, exclusion is the rule,” he says.

Class and company pursuits stay entwined with overseas powers – above all, the United States. “The political regression we are seeing takes us not back to the 20th century, but to the 19th, when the US sought territorial expansion,” he provides.

The legacies of slavery and conquest nonetheless form the area. In Brazil, the violence of colonisation persists in state brutality and concrete inequality.