Portraits of an Invisible Country . . . The Photographs of Jorge Mario M??nera

Exhibition Dates: February 18 – June 30, 2004.

La obra de Jorge Mario M??nera es algo m?°s que simple naturalismo, es una mirada que m?°s que suelta, podr??a decirse que est?° liberada de la servidumbre del ojo. Y que atrae jirones del tiempo, de ese tiempo que afuera corre como un galgo o se desliza hacia lo inexorable, mientras el artista, un testigo de cargo, monta su tr??pode entre arenas y sue?±o .

Juan Manuel Roca

Jorge Mario M??nera's portraits stand as witnesses of the diverse human landscape found in the vast extension of the Colombian territory. As Edward Weston, Robert Frank or Richard Avedon in the American Midwest, M??nera's photography is a document of the discovery of elusive communities, as well as a piercing psychological study of these usually invisible subjects.

With more than two decades of incessant traveling across his country, M??nera's photographs achieve their unique artistic strength not only by the careful craft of the images depicted, but also by their open defiance of the erasure of the public space in Colombia. In a country where violence in the streets has eroded the public space to confining their citizens to just private spaces, M??nera's delicate portraits constitute a mapping of the increasingly inaccessible territory of the quotidian. Portraiture in M??nera's work is therefore not only a photographic technique that has been mastered, but also a tool for bringing forth the subjectivity of the invisible human landscape that silently inhabits Colombia, and an attempt to restore its ailing social tissue.

There are no maps for or about the quotidian, though, for which the forty two silver gelatin and ten digital prints collected in Portraits of an Invisible Country do not intend to conform a definitive cartography of Colombia. Instead, they are placed here as traces, as precarious watermarks of the continuous, errant journey that Jorge Mario M??nera started in the late seventies across his country. Continuous wandering, indeed, is the loose “method” that the photographer followed in his travels, and that has been invoked here as the guiding principle in this exhibition. It is only through incessant roaming–-that does not contemplate a final destination—in which new spaces (and the people which inhabit them) are opened, revealed to the eye, and new maps created.

In order to accommodate to the restrained, challenging cartography of DRCLAS, this exhibit has been organized in five sections: Pacific (1), Andean (2), Caribbean (3), Orinoco (4) and Amazonian (5). Each of these not only correspond to the five natural regions in which Colombians have usually divided their territory but, more importantly, to a type of portraiture technique that M??nera has deployed in the photographs: the studio medium shot (1), the environmental close up (2), the studio complete shot (3), the studio close up (4), and the candid close up (5). Each of them suiting the different challenges posed by the different subjects, these techniques are further explained by some of the photographs which we have highlighted and which we hope could serve to the spectator as resting stops in their own wanderings across this exhibition.

Jos?© Luis Falconi, Curator

Latin American and Latino Art Forum
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University

This exhibit is made possible by the generous support of the Gustavo Brillembourg Memorial Fund.

© 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All images ©2003 Jorge Mario M??nera.