V. Photographing the still: Colombia There is no worse violence than the one we personally experience, none so complex, so apparently unsolvable. However, states of paroxysm towards the crumbling of the minimum principles of coexistence give birth to works that wouldn’ t be possible in any other way.
The fully uniformed bodies of men and women who grew up with the language of weapons are one of the symptoms of a never ending war where hunter and killer seldom exchange their roles. Colombian art, and of course, photography in the context of art, have pretty clear lessons about it, to such degree that violence becomes a common place, a matter that, upon being so explored, demands different approaches, each time more refined.
Some artists have approached the manner with more or less profoundness, to understand it by themselves. Something similar happens with some graphic journalists who have been added to contemporary art, since usually almost no artist reaches that level of contact with the people and places that are part of the war.
One of these photojournalists is Jesús Abad Colorado( Medellín, 1967), who has documented the last two decades of the armed conflict, almost half of this time independently. To understand the difficulty that the work of Abad Colorado carries would seem to take arguments away from anyone who analyzes his images; there is, however, a formal bet in his way of portraying the subject, a way of narrating that must be interpreted. His photos offer visual formulas: exposition of the victim, an expressive tone – the armies in the middle –, an aesthetic that has made the usual spectator more impervious, used to the eternal funerary parade that happens in the screens and printed media. No one knows what exactly is going on in Colombia. So many tensions happen at once that in a moment violence becomes a natural part of daily life, and then it disappears.
Abad Colorado proposes a war didactic, which means,
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