between reality and“ reality”. His work, of auratic origin, with physical evidence of violent events, has such a grade of loyalty to objects and persons that it gives them a process of dignity and beauty, so the manifestation of horror comes later. Echevarría’ s aesthetical strategy is the synthesis with which he extracts evidences of reality, putting them under a scientific analysis that unchains powerful images, hardly solvable, and that integrate history, anthropology, sociology, botany.
Jesús Abad Colorado, Comuna trece
through a mental and physical development of the work. This is properly the first distinction between photojournalism and art, between urgency and delay, between evidence and concealing. Juan Manuel Echavarría( Medellín, 1947) is a case worthy to celebrate the dialogue
The question is if beauty can do it all, if it can even show us its terrible face – maybe our own reflection –, and if we are able to see it. The social situation in Colombia is a hard paradox: if you hear what’ s going on you will rise up, and if you rise up you are in danger of being terminated, or of falling in the same violent logic. Echeverría leaves a hard work for the spectator: to continue expectant, caught in the beauty of its pieces, or become an interactor, an individual responsible for his and everyone else’ s existence.
Bandeja de Bolívar( 1999) is an extraordinary photo sequence that tells the frustrated illusion
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