Ten or so years ago I decided to write a series of articles on photography around the world, partly simply to get away from what I thought was an over-emphasis on photography in the USA in the histories and other accounts of photography, but also out of a genuine interest in work that was being produced in various countries, particularly those that appeared to have been little affected by what I saw as a kind of curatorial virus that seemed to my mind to have enfeebled photography over the past 20 or so years in much of Europe and the USA.
Rather than simply pick on countries randomly as I came on interesting work on the web, or rather as well as doing that, I decided to try and make a more systematic survey, and decided to start with photography in Central and South America. Since I was being systematic I decided to approach the countries of the region in alphabetical order, and thus started to find out all I could about photography in Argentina.
Although I was only writing relatively brief features, I also adopted a fairly systematic approach, or at least as far as possible. I began each country feature with what I could find about the early history of photography there, from its beginnings up to around the start of the twentieth century. Usually I wrote about interesting work by photographers from elsewhere who had visited the country, and I tried to find and write about the photographers who had become accepted as the country’s most interesting in the twentieth century but were no longer living or working. In a final section I looked at contemporary photographers, making my own judgements on work that I could find on the web or in my library.
Occasionally I came across so much material that I needed to write several features on a country, and progress through the continent was slow. Of course I wasn’t trying to write a definitive work about each country, these were just introductory pieces, but much of the material they contained was little known outside the countries themselves – and in some cases even within it.
Alphabetically I got as far as Mexico, where I wrote four articles, including two on Manuel Alvarez Bravo, so I still had a few countries to cover. One of them was Peru, although I had written a lengthy six part feature on Peru’s greatest photographer, Martin Chambi (1891) which had also brought in the work of some other Peruvian photographers. Some day when have more time I’ll perhaps go back and bring some of these old pieces up to date and re-publish them, but for the moment they are no longer available on line.
All of which is a very long preamble to a web site I came across the other day, of a collective of three photographers who call themselves Versus, and there is interesting work there and elsewhere from all of them.
The web site doesn’t seem to have any information about them, although there is a group statement about their approach. Gihan Tubbeh is a 26 year old Peruvian, and there is more about her on the 1000 words blog.
Musuk Nolte is roughly the same age and you can see some of his pictures on his VII Visonaires page, along with a picture of him and a link to his blog – im Spanish but there is very little text on it – mainly just titles and his pictures, and you can use Google translate.
Renzo Giraldo‘s web site has an English version with a picture of him and some information as well as his work as a photojournalist and personal projects. He was born in 1976 and so is the oldest of the three at around 35.
