Pubdate: Fri, 15 Feb 2013
Source: Houston Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2013 Houston Chronicle Publishing Company Division, Hearst Newspaper
Contact:  http://www.chron.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/198
Author: Molly Glentzer

AN EMOTIONAL, ARTFUL SPIN ON MEXICO'S DRUG WAR

Fernando Brito, the photo editor of El Debate de Culiacan, a
newspaper in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, was in Houston last week
for a talk related to FotoFest's exhibit "Cronicas: Seven
Contemporary Mexican Artists Confront the Drug War."

A slender man with an outsized black beard, he wore big, fashionable
black glasses lined in orange, a cerulean blue running jacket and
track shoes with his jeans. A big chain dangled from his belt to a
pocket. It was a rather flashy look for such a quiet man.

Brito, the only photojournalist of the group, has 13 color prints in
the exhibit from a series called "Your Steps Were Lost in the
Landscape." Each shows a corpse, or several corpses, from a slight
distance, within an epic-looking landscape. In one or two cases, you
might mistake the figures as guys taking siestas in uncomfortable positions.

Brito photographs them with dignity, never close up on the faces,
because he wants you to know they could be anyone - or Everymen. When
he's asked to speak about them, he always talks about the problem of
the drug war, not the imagery. "I want to denounce what has happened.
I'm just a citizen with an opportunity to do something more," he said.

He studied marketing but, with jobs scarce, joined the newspaper in
2004. Photography was just a hobby until then, and he was plunged more
directly into the drug war than he had been by just living in one of
Mexico's most violent states.

"When I went to work at a newspaper, I began to realize you have a
responsibility because all you do they're going to think is true," he
said.

In 2006, he also began shooting for himself at crime sites, after he'd
photographed the requisite gruesome close-ups the paper wanted.
"Really, I don't know how this happened," he said as he walked through
the hallway, viewing his prints. "I'm never alone with the dead
bodies. There are always police there."

Nor did he know what he'd do with the work he was amassing until a
friend who was publishing a book showed him fictionalized images of
bodies in fields. "I have the same thing, but real," Brito told his
friend.

He's still photographing, with no shortage of material. In 2004, there
were about 300 murders in Sinaloa. Last year, there were 1,600.

"Always, I am afraid. That is the most important thing in my work," he
said.

Brito's family, which includes his parents, four brothers, nine
nephews and a niece, has a food business; they make chorizo and other
meat products. He's 37 and has a girlfriend, but they won't have
children, he said, because they don't want to raise boys in an
environment where young men, increasingly, choose careers with the
cartel.

He has no desire to leave, however, because it's home. "Culiacan is
not a beautiful city. We don't have a beach, tourists. But the people
are great. They are happy people," he said.

We came upon Jorge Arreola Barraza's photographs of big, empty
billboards above the streets of Ciudad Juarez. "These are fantastic,"
Brito said. "This is what they talk about there because they don't
have work. Juarez is like a ghost town."

Then he pointed toward Miguel Aragon's beautiful burnt
residue-embossed prints, which turn newspaper images of murdered
bodies into creamy, almost abstract artworks. Aragon, too, is from
Juarez. "These are crazy," Brito said, meaning it in a good way. "I am
not an artist, but I know a lot of artists."

Curator Jennifer Ward said she thought Aragon's prints look like the
disappeared - "that last impression left in your memory."

You'd have to look really hard to see that Aragon's "Severed"
originated with a photograph of two severed heads. "This would be real
difficult to look at if it were a color photograph," Ward said.

Another set of prints by Aragon features large-scale, blown-up
portraits of corpses from Juarez news photos. Using an electric drill,
he's punched thousands of tiny holes into the spaces of each digital
dot - an angry technique that reflects the aggression portrayed.

As different as their work is, Brito and Aragon are similar in that
they don't place blame on their subjects. Ward explained, "A life is a
life. It doesn't matter if they're from a cartel or innocent
bystanders."

She limited the multimedia exhibit to artists who live in Mexico or
have family there and have to deal with the drug war daily. All are in
their 30s, so they were at an important stage in their development as
artists during the ultra-violent period from 2006 to 2010.

Much of the work is photo-or video-based, but Ward avoided
traditional photojournalism. "Sometimes, photography can be didactic,"
she said. "I wanted to show emotional responses."

Ivete Lucas, who's from Monterrey, lives in Houston now. "She's the
one artist in the show who points a finger at everybody," Ward said.

The centerpiece of Lucas' installation is a video compiled from 500
found bits of news footage, online media and pop-cultural video. The
screen is framed by newspaper clippings with sometimes sly references
to the governor of Nuevo Leon. At the base, a concrete brick wall
re-creates a message left by cartel members after they murdered the
governor's guards.

"Palas por Pistolas" is the exhibit's most conceptual work. It
consists of a row of pristine shovels from a collection of 1,527 by
Pedro Reyes of Culiacan. Each shovel is made from a gun he collected
during a donation drive and melted down.

One of the shovels will be used to plant a tree in Guadalupe Plaza
Park, 2311 Runnels, at 9 a.m. Saturday.

"He represents hope," Ward said. 
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