The Photography of Evan Abramson

The Photography of Evan Abramson

In February 2002 I embarked with a friend on a journey through Latin America intended to be purely over land and over in six months, the itinerary being: Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil. We started hitchhiking on Valentine’s Day 2002 and when I reached Bolivia nearly 13 months later I was alone, and unbeknownst to me, prepared to stay. I spent the next 14 months living and traveling through a wide network of rural Andean villages and provincial lands of barren pastoral settings and enormous natural obstacles to human impact. The people I met were mostly farmers, economically impoverished, humble and earnest in their approach to life, and very honest with me; they viewed the work I did photographing them with a great deal of curiosity and suspicion, as oftentimes I was the first foreigner to reach their village in several decades.

As an artist and experienced traveler, I learned to forget my foreignness amid the vastness of history and culture and cultural shifts that were taking place before my eyes and senses on a daily basis as I lived increasingly closer to and more intimately among the most socially and politically marginalized of the Americas—namely, the American Indigenous. I took it upon myself to respond creatively to what I saw and sensed were fleeting monuments to the past, in the face of increasing international awareness and modernizing ‘progress.’ In order to realize the creation of this work, I participated in as much of the daily lives and rituals of its subjects as I possibly could, including the Tinku, or “Encounter”—a ritual fight between members of neighboring zones or villages—even going so far as to learn the Pre-Columbian Quechua language more widely spoken in the Andean countryside than Spanish.

The photographs I chose to compose, whether through the lens, or in the ‘pausing’ and sometimes setting up of people as well, reflect a deep personal understanding of subject, and the social and cultural contexts from which these subjects as individuals originate. By focusing on photography of individuals, families and rites of passage such as the fighting of the Tinku, I attempt to express the experience of the Self living within a strong, traditional cultural society where almost everyone is, first and foremost, a farmer and a peasant; and a history that dates back to before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas at the turn of the 16th Century. As a subtext, the question of how individuals with extremely limited contact outside of their immediate geographical area relate to the act of being photographed directly (as opposed to discreetly or secretly, with a zoom lens from afar for example, a practice which I did not partake in) also permeates most of the images in this project. For many of the individuals and communities involved, these photographs are the first and only attempt anyone has made to communicate with them for the purpose of expressing their lives—or something of their collective life experience: as a culture, a community or a living history—some of the oldest and most anciently rooted living histories of the Americas, incarnations of those most original of American civilizations.

Evan Abramson
4 Orchard Road
Great Neck, NY 11021
United States
6467240084
lovevan@optonline.net

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