Ojo Latino is a new photography column feature for NPPA’s News Photographer digital magazine. Its author Anita Baca, a photo editor for the Associated Press based in Mexico City, writes about Latin American photographers.
By Anita Baca
Meeting Venezuelan Verónica Sanchis Bencomo, the founder and curator of Foto-Féminas, at the Women Photograph Workshop in Quito, Ecuador, was such a treat. We share the same affection for interviewing photographers about their work. She’s a woman with a quiet ego and immense energy that culminates in her ideas becoming reality. Highly esteemed, she has a loyal following.
The women I reached out to gladly provided photos for this column at the mere mention of her name because they were happy to see that Verónica was being featured.
Verónica solely established Foto-Féminas, a digital platform that catalogs and preserves the work of Latin American and Caribbean female photographers.
As a teenager, Verónica could be found in her Caracas, Venezuela, home creating visual narratives with family snapshots and preserving them in a giant photo album. The covers were adorned with images she clipped from National Geographic magazines purchased at a local kiosk.
It never occurred to Verónica to pursue a degree in photography; her passion for collecting images and cataloging them was more of a hobby. She remembers that “it was something that was not considered a serious career in Venezuela at the time.” She was actually thinking about majoring in sociology.
Verónica took a gap year at the age of 17 and traveled to the United Kingdom to learn English. There she learned photography could be a serious endeavor. One day, her English professor asked her, “What do you really, really, really want to do?” She knew.
Before long Verónica found herself volunteering in the library of the International Center of Photography in New York City, where she was working as a teaching assistant. Here she came across the work of some of the uber-famous and more amazing work by others she had never heard of. But she wondered about her contemporary peers. She was curious about what female photographers her age were doing. Surely there must be work out there in a region as vast as Latin America, she thought.
And there was, but the avenues for getting work recognized were limited. Just a handful were known outside the region. Before I moved to Mexico City, I would have been hard-pressed to name more than two Latin American photographers off the top of my head: Sebastião Salgado and Graciela Iturbide, the uber-famous. And after living here more than 10 years, I could have rattled off a list of agency photographers and, yes, mostly men.
But Verónica changed that when she launched Foto-Féminas on Jan. 1, 2015, featuring Argentine photographer Lorena Marchetti. It was not a flashy launch, but a thoughtful, symbolic birth of sorts, giving life to an ever-growing digital archive, showcasing the work of one Latin American female photographer at a time on a monthly basis.
Lorena’s passion is exploring Latin American landscapes with special attention to city outskirts. Even before drone photography became a thing, she was climbing hills and terraces to capture the best bird’s-eye views of a chromatic palette exploring space, context and culture.
“Each one of these popular neighborhoods or new neighborhoods can best be described as corals that make up a reef, which rise out of nothing and become epicenters and informal settlements that go on shaping the mosaic of the city, creating new landscapes very much their own,” Lorena tells Foto-Féminas.
The site is exceptional in the diversity of style, running the gamut from documentary to conceptual photography.
Foto-Féminas welcomes the female gaze, complicated, refreshing, exploring hard truths, challenging societal norms. Common themes include family, culture, femininity and self-reflection, slowly erasing the stereotypical vision that Latin American is a homogeneous population. Think about it: The region is composed of 33 countries with distinct cultures and traditions.
Ana Espinal, the May 2020 featured photographer, was born and raised in the Dominican Republic. Her “Part of Me” series focuses on the menstrual cycle, and she wants to dispel the shame associated with menstruation. “I want to convey the hidden reality of the female body, the pain and the imperfections that are not openly talked about and remain invisible,” she told Verónica.
Chilean visual artist and photographer Gabriela Rivera Lucero, featured in the November 2017 post, takes on the language and culture in which the names of animals are used to denigrate women, such as dog, snake, pig and “mosquita muerta,” which translates to dead fly, meaning a manipulator or two-faced woman. Gabriela makes self-portraits wearing masks she stitches using animal skins and entrails. “I work with postmortem raw material, animal remains that imply a serialized carnivorous consumption, detached from animal care: creatures deprived of affection and/or stripped from their natural conditions,” she said.
Photographers Gabo Caruso of Argentina, Ana María Arévalo Gosen of Venezuela and Constanza Hevia H. of Chile take the documentary approach, introducing us to trans children, incarcerated women in Venezuela and aging, respectively.
Gabo, the September 2019 featured photographer, introduces us to Cora, who one night, then 3 years old, told his mother, “When I grow up, I want to be a girl.” That was in 2014, before Cora was Cora. On her website, Gabocaruso.com, Gabo wrote, “I met Cora when she was seven years old, two autumns after having made her transit. Cora belongs to the first generation to make its transit since childhood. These little people are carrying out a true gender revolution. My wish is to continue photographing her throughout her life.”
Ana’s “Dias Eternos,” or Eternal Days, project featured in the March 2020 post reveals the conditions of women in pretrial detention jails and prisons in Venezuela. Women are sentenced to a minimum of 45 days, but some are detained for longer, even years. The women receive no food, water or medical attention, requiring help from the outside to survive. In September, Ana was awarded the Camille Lepage Award, which comes with 8,000 euros in prize money and will allow her to expand her report regionally.
In “The Time I Have Left” photo essay, Constanza portrays the last year of Hugo Küschel, the oldest man in her grandparents’ village, broaching elderly memory loss and confusion and its relation to mortality, in an October 2018 post.
Each post on Foto-Féminas includes a brief bio, engaging the featured photographer in a few questions and providing a summary explaining her work. I am never left guessing what I am looking at and why it matters. The text is published in both English and Spanish in order to reach a wider audience, says Verónica.
To date, she has introduced us to more than 80 Latin American female photographers, some of them students, some emerging, some already established. What matters is the photographer’s level of commitment to her work. Verónica is not interested in photos made parachuting into a foreign country or cool vacation snaps, but in projects with “a coherent narrative and a strong voice.” These days she is especially interested in featuring more work focused on environmental issues.
For a time all we knew of Latin America was violence, poverty, corruption and usually from a foreigner’s point of view and most probably male.
It’s not that she thinks we should suppress the ugly, the tragic, the horrors, but that there should be more of a balance in the types of stories photographers tell, and who tells them.
The site accomplishes its mission: to create a virtual community of Latin American female photographers where they can feature their work with the hope of finding new opportunities. In fact, some editors have contacted Verónica to put them in touch with some of the featured photographers. “I am not an agent by any means, but this is always the best feeling,” she says.
For me, as a photographer and editor for over 30 years, it's such a joy to see women taking control of their own cultural narratives. Verónica has helped make that happen.
Anita Baca is a photo editor for The Associated Press and is based in Mexico City. She can be reached at [email protected]. Baca will write an occasional photo column for News Photographer about Latin American photographers.
Verónica Sanchis Bencomo (b. 1986) is a Spanish-Venezuelan curator and photographer focusing on portraiture and current affairs. After living for five years in Hong Kong, Verónica is relocating to New York City, where she will live with her two daughters and husband, Mikko. Alongside her own photography, she dedicates time to her second passion: interviewing photographers for publications online and in print. Her current article is “In Search of Life’s Small, Ephemeral Qualities” published on the phmuseum.com website in July.
Verónica can be reached via her social media accounts: Twitter: @VeronicaSanchis | Instagram: @veronicasanchis
