Cold War Camera: Visual Legacies in Latin America

Cold War Camera aims to increase and deepen public understandings of the Cold War and its legacies in Latin America. Recent academic scholarship, and events such as the ongoing Efrain Rios Montt genocide trial in Guatemala or the late 2014 declaration of a thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations, demonstrate that the conflict remains a potent political and cultural force. This project proposes that photography is a powerful means to promote timely reflection on and public awareness of the legacies and memories of the Latin American Cold War. Its premise is that photography had and still has a key role in the cultural politics of the global conflict: through state surveillance operations; through deployment in resistance to state-sponsored terrorism; and by its role in commemorative and judicial processes. Questions of visuality - of what can (and cannot) be seen, known, and felt, - stand at the centre of the cultural politics of the Cold War and its aftermath.
Cold War Camera is a collaboration with the Centro de la Imagen (Mexico's premier institution dedicated to the diffusion and discussion of photography) and the internationally-recognised Guatemalan photographer and activist Daniel Hernandez-Salazar. The project takes the form of three practitioner workshops to be hosted in partnership with cultural institutions dedicated to the preservation and promotion of memory of the conflict in lesser known sites of Cold War: The Museum of Memories (Asuncion), National Police Historical Archive (Guatemala City) and the University Cultural Centre Tlatelolco (Mexico City). These locations represent productive points of comparison: i.e., the Guatemalan genocide was ethnically inflected; Guatemala and Paraguay hold important 'archives of terror' and have undergone truth commissions, whereas Mexico's archival record is patchy and the process of transitional justice has stalled.
The workshops will bring photographers from different Latin American countries together with professionals from the partner institutions, and with human rights activists, curators and academics to stimulate creative work that investigates what can be learned from the local histories, lived experiences, material traces of the Cold War, as well as its transnational connections. It will lead to a major exhibition funded, produced by and displayed at the Centro de la Imagen's prestigious Mexico City gallery to open in October 2017.

The focus of 'Cold War Camera: Visual Legacies in Latin America' is on impact-generating activities and engagement with new user communities and non-academic audiences. The following groups and organisations will benefit from and/or be 'users' of the project in the ways outlined below:

(a) Photographers: this project is aimed at emerging photographers from Latin America and presents a unique opportunity for career development. Participation in the project will provide a creative and intellectual environment in which to produce work in collaboration with a multi-disciplinary team, to be mentored by an internationally-acclaimed photographer, to gain international profile for their work during the AHRC-funded phase of the project through the public-facing activities that will take place during the workshops; to enhance their international networks; to have their work curated by and shown in Mexico's premier gallery dedicated to photography; to gain access to a UK and US international platform through collaboration with Autograph, and the PI and Co-I. Participation in the project is likely to have a significant creative and professional impact on the photographers' long-term career development.

(b) Centro de la Imagen and Autograph (ABP): these institutions will bring substantial expertise to the project at the same time as benefiting from participation through the opportunity to: enhance their research capacity through collaboration with the PI and CI; work collaboratively and innovatively with a multidisciplinary team to produce creative outputs; gain access to archives and cultural institutions across the Americas; establish future collaborative relationships with a variety of institutions and individuals.

(c) 'Sites of Conscience': this project will be carried out in partnership with 3 institutions engaged with the promotion of social justice, human rights and the preservation and promotion of memory of the experience of local inflections of Cold War. Through participation in the project these institutions stand to benefit during the workshop stage by gaining international profile for their work, both within the region and beyond; by the opportunity for knowledge exchange with similar organisations within the region and academics engaged with questions of human rights, social justice and cultural memory. As signalled by 'Nunca Más', the title frequently given to human rights reports, an understanding of past violence is essential to justice in the present and future. This project seeks to explore the ways in which photography has and can play a role in these processes and therefore serves to advance the core mission of the partner institutions.

(c) Public audiences: this project aims to promote an understanding of the history, culture and legacy of the Cold War amongst public audiences in Paraguay, Guatemala and Mexico. During the workshops, these audiences will be engaged through media coverage of our activities in each location and through interactive sessions with members of the public and the project team, where the focus will be on their experience and understandings of the local inflections of the Cold War and on reflection the often invisible but pervasive presence of photographic images and practices.

(d) Police: this is a pilot element of the project in which we aim to work with members of the police in Mexico to prompt reflection on the status and significance of human rights in their daily professional lives. We will harness the creative potential and resources of the project team to devise a workshop that works through the medium of photography to prompt reflection on human rights. Through a focus on photography's pivotal role in upholding and abusing human rights, this pilot aims to promote self-reflective professional practice and self-awareness. If successful, the pilot will be developed and applied to other areas in Mexico and potentially, beyond.