Emerging art photography in Colombia.

During the last few weeks Galeria Mu and photography school Zona Cinco, celebrating the gallery’s second anniversary, organized a set of fine art photography conferences featuring a few distinguished upcoming artists who have been making interesting work for the past years in the very narrow and relatively “new” context of Colombian fine art photography. It was a bold and great initiative with intentions of approaching a wider audience and familiarizing them with the current state of contemporary photographic art practices in the Colombian context. The event was relatively successful, the attendance was higher than expected and the public seemed to be eager about the subject.  The conferences were mainly personal retrospectives by the Authors talking about their background, experience, approach and showcasing their work. Sadly the discussions that followed the individual conferences were frivolous and trivial at the most. I do not blame this on the artists or the organizers, I believe it has more to do with the little previous exposure and understanding the audience had of the subject matter as most of the public seemed more interested with the technical details and other superficial aspects of the photographs, instead of inquiring about the real substance of the art work. It’s only natural for this to happen in a context where art photography is a relatively new and unfamiliar concept to the general public. I also believe that this kind of events will grow in number and also in quality in the near future with the further democratization of information and the inclusion of new art venues that help make art more accessible to everyone.

I would like to feature three of the artists who I thought had some of the strongest and interesting works.

Juanita Carrasco
Juanita’s work revolves around accumulated memory through the deconstruction and latter reconfiguration of urban landscape through both digital and plastic means. Her work challenges the conventions of “normal” format within photographic presentation often making asymmetric, polygonal and three-dimensional pieces that borderline between prints and installation.

Javier Venegas.
Javier is a very young artist who works with a diverse number of subjects and media. The work that really caught my attention was an installation piece entitled Postmodern Portrait. The piece explores the digital dematerialization of photographic representation as well as the sociological conventions of social and familiar photography in the last decades in Colombia. It reflects on how digital display systems have become memory vessels replacing material photography and frames.

Diana Beltrán.
Diana’s work “Technological Transformation” Is both strongly conceptual and quite poetic. The work revolves around identity transfigurations through technology. How mass media and technology change our perceptions and relations in both life and identity.