‘The End of Silence’: The Photographs of Antonio Turok
With this week’s issue, we’re debuting a new culture column that we’ll be running once a month here in our México Solidarity Bulletin. The artist Tina Modotti’s iconic image of a Mexicana freedom-flag bearer captures our intent to fill this Expressions space with art and culture that serves social transformation.
For this first Expressions, we’re highlighting the work of famed photographer Antonio Turok, the focus of an exhibition this past fall put together by the Eastern Projects Gallery in Los Angeles. This exhibition showcased Turok’s life-long effort to depict the turbulent history of México’s indigenous and mestizo communities. We excerpt here a Jimmy Centeno review of that exhibition, The End of Silence.
Upon the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Zapatista 1994 uprising in Chiapas, Mexico drew the world’s attention to the perverse logic of domination by a modern colonial world system against people from the Global South… The Zapatistaun proyecto de vida against losmalos goviernos is sealed in many of Turok’s images. He captures the solidarity muscle behind the rebel group.
Turok’s medium of choice of black and white photography glares out the distraction that comes with color photography. It allows him to remove the blinders to the rawness of the present world order.
Mujeres Zapatistas, 1994, Antonio Turok
The silver emulsion in Turok’s black-and-white photography, unlike digital, carries the mystic silver rays of Tonanzin, the moon goddess of Mesoamerica. It is what allows his work to glow out of darkness…
Turok carries with him the spilled blood and the dust of hope. Every so often he releases the energy of these photographs in spaces known as galleries and museums as a soul cleansing ritual for all to engage in. The energy as resurrection then walks among the living, whispering their unknown stories…
Entrance of the Ejercito Zapatista, Chiapas, 1994
The silent co-authors of The End of Silence do not ask for anything. They fight for what is owed to them: dignity, justice, and peace. They fight against the very same system and people who have deemed them as backward cultures and useless for modernity.
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