So That All Shall Know/Para que todos lo sepan
Subtitle: Photographs by Daniel Hernández-Salazar [Fotografías por Daniel Hernández-Salazar]
Edition: Bilingual edition
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: May 1, 2007
Language: eng; spa
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 184
ISBN-13: 9780292714670
Subjects: Cultural studies; Photographs: collections; Photography; Photo Techniques; Latin America; Criticism; Individual Photographer; Photography / Individual Photographer; Latin America - Central America; Documentary photography; Guatemala; Hernâandez-Salazar, Daniel
Description: Table of Contents

    * Foreword: The Vantage Point of Memory / Prólogo: El mirador de la memoria (Rigoberta Menchú Tum)
    * Introduction / Presentación (Oscar Iván Maldonado)
    * Angels, Conquests, and Memory / Ángeles, conquistas y memoria (W. George Lovell)
    * Portfolio: Daniel Hernández-Salazar, Photojournalist / Daniel Hernández-Salazar, fotoperiodista
    * Icon of Memory / Icono para la memoria (Miguel Flores Castellanos)
    * Portfolio: Eros + Thanatos
    * Daniel Hernández-Salazar, Postmodern Humanist / Daniel Hernández-Salazar, un humanista posmoderno (Michael A. Weinstein)
    * Portfolio: Memory of an Angel / Memoria de un ángel
    * Photography, Urban Space, and the Historical Memory of Atrocity: The Angel Series / Fotografía, espacio urbano y la memoria histórica de la atrocidad: La serie del ángel (Steven Hoelscher)
    * Biographies / Biografías

Introduction

    Years pass. They pile up like pages in a book.
    Everything goes unpunished. I have to scream.

    —Daniel Hernández-Salazar, Memoria de un ángel [Exhibition text]

In 1993, Daniel Hernández-Salazar asked me to write a text to accompany his photo exhibit Rostros de la Música (Faces of Music). It was a show of portraits of traditional musicians from different ethnomusical regions in Guatemala. I was already familiar with Daniel and his work, but writing this text allowed me to delve deeper into his oeuvre and get a better grasp of the principles upon which his artistic work is founded. Two features of Daniel's work impressed me: first, his rigor for recording facts and personalities; and second, his commitment to documenting key moments in Guatemala. What I did not mention at the time, something I still find striking, is the dignity that Daniel captured in the persons he photographed. His portraiture bestowed on each musician the dignity that marginalization and oblivion had wrested from them.

More than a decade on, I realize that restoring dignity to people whom circumstances have marginalized and forgotten is a primordial concern that drives Daniel's work. I allude not only to his series on traditional musicians but also to his entire work, including what he has achieved in photojournalism. Ever since I have known him, I have appreciated his work intimately and understand his concern for making artistic creation a factor in social change. I find it natural for him, therefore, to shift from art galleries to public spaces and from decorative aesthetics to the truth as his central theme. Although many people observe a certain harshness in Daniel's current work, its beauty endures. His work is charged with the beauty of truth, as Gordon Nary noted when honoring Daniel with the Jonathan Mann Humanitas Award in recognition of the humanity of his work.

His eight years as a photojournalist, mostly in the violent 1980s, awakened Daniel's consciousness about the tragedy of war, especially when the victims are civilians and the victimizers those supposed to protect them. The fruit of those years is by no means merely the extensive photographic collection portraying the suffering of Guatemala and Guatemalans. Rather, it is his concrete commitment to reporting the truth about suffering, to demonstrating that pain is not anonymous: it always has a face and a name. Daniel sticks tenaciously to this commitment, converting it into artistic production. Rigoberta Menchú Tum was among the first to acknowledge the essence of this craft. "Thank you," the Nobel laureate wrote at the bottom of a portrait Daniel made of her, "for your friendship and your contribution to the just cause." Rigoberta's portrait hangs on the wall of Daniel's studio, a reminder of his ongoing commitment.

This commitment and the aesthetic form it takes are what inspired me to put this book together. The book is not a comprehensive compilation of Daniel's work, nor is it meant to be. What it does is follow Daniel through much of his creative trajectory, one spanning two decades, beginning with his photojournalistic output and ending with his public space installations and actions, including the mutilation and fragmentation of reproductions of his work that had been used to represent, once again, the tragedy of war.

The book has three main objectives. The first, deeply embedded in Daniel's creative and professional motivation, is to dignify the more than two hundred thousand victims of the armed conflict and to denounce the horrors of war so that they will not happen again. It would be impossible and unfair, Daniel maintains, to forget so much pain and suffering or to aspire to build a new and better country by turning away from the truth. Second, the book seeks to make visible the Guatemalan holocaust and to place it among other world tragedies: Guatemala's conflict, which targeted primarily the poorest and least privileged, received scant attention from the international community. As conflicts elsewhere fill today's headlines, Guatemala's war and its traumatic aftermath seem even less newsworthy, almost invisible. Daniel's installation of his Angel icon reminds us that whether in a Chuj Maya community in Guatemala's remote northwestern highlands or in Hiroshima, the pain of war is universal. And third, the book develops Rigoberta Menchú Tum's acknowledgment of an artist who remains true to the "just cause" of reconfiguring history, understanding the truth, and so glimpsing the future. For this reason, Daniel Hernández-Salazar is among the most renowned and influential artists in Guatemalan and Central American photography.

Poignant, frank, and moving, Daniel's work is often difficult to frame. Four scholars, with four different perspectives, help us to situate Daniel and his work in historical, political, geographical, and artistic contexts. George Lovell, with his characteristic balance between academic rigor and poetic expression, juxtaposes his sightings of Daniel's polyptych Clarification and a panorama of Guatemala based on Eduardo Galeano's epic trilogy Memory of Fire. Miguel Flores Castellanos explores the links between Daniel's current work and early Central American photography, his previous activities as a photojournalist and commercial photographer, and the controversies that charge contemporary photography. From his viewpoint as an analyst of art and politics, Michael Weinstein examines Daniel's series Eros + Thanatos in the context of postmodernity and of a globalized world. Finally, historical memory and the importance of remembering form the basis of Steven Hoelscher's analysis of Daniel's installations in public spaces, set against the backdrop of a postconflict social landscape.

So That All Shall Know is perhaps the most emblematic image of all Daniel's work. He was inspired to use this title by Monsignor Juan Gerardi, who had proposed it for the human rights report ultimately entitled Guatemala: Never Again. Depicting an angel who breaks the silence with a shout, So That All Shall Know is a reminder of the commitment shared by Daniel and the murdered bishop: to reveal the truth as an act of liberation.