Our Culture Is Our Resistance: Repression, Refuge, and Healing in Guatemala - Hardcover

Jonathan Moller; Rigoberta Menchú Tum

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1576872122 ISBN 13: 9781576872123

Publisher: powerHouse Books, 2004

Synopsis

Spanish Edition available:  Nuestra Cultura es Nuestra Resistencia: Represión, Refugio y Recuperación en Guatemala   "Between 1993 and 2003 Jonathan Moller photographed communities uprooted by war in Guatemala. The result is Our Culture Is Our Resistance, a collection of portraits taken during that decade, revealing stories of life and death, of hope and despair, and of struggles for survival, respect, and truth. The beauty and strength of Moller's photographs and the accompanying texts not only document and preserve the faces and events associated with this land and its history, but also display for the viewer the humanity and dignity of these largely Mayan indigenous peoples."
Featuring 147 tritone portraits, Our Culture Is Our Resistance includes an introduction by Guatemalan Nobel Peace Laureate, Rigoberta Menchú Tum; essays by Francisco Goldman, Susanne Jonas, and Ricardo Falla; prose and poetry by Eduardo Galeano, Julia Esquivel, Francisco Morales Santos, Humberto Ak'abal, and Heather Dean. The book also includes testimonies and reflections by Guatemalan community members and survivors, as well as statements by photographer Sebastião Salgado, Eduardo Galeano a noted Guatemalan anthropologist, Jesuit priest and author, and William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA.

About this title

About the Author:

Jonathan "Jonás" Moller is an award-winning documentary photographer and human rights activist.   Since 1991 Moller has worked throughout Latin America, primarily Guatemala and Peru, documenting and photographing the repercussions of violent internal conflicts, and supporting work for truth and justice.  Moller has published two books on Guatemala's 36-year war, Our Culture Is Our Resistance, and Rescatando Nuestra Memoria, (Recovering Our Historical Memory).  His most recent book The Past is Present: Memories of Peru's Internal Armed Conflict was released in 2017.  Numerous high resolution photographs fill the pages of Moller's books, as well as essays, memories and reflections from the communities and victims of war.  Moller has an upcoming book (2019) presenting, through his photography, a visual display of the vibrant diversity among young Cubans.

Review:

"With his photographs, Jonathan Moller reminds the present generation of the extreme wave of brutality that engulfed the people of Guatemala twenty years ago. Because of my Latin-American heritage, my blood turns to ice when I see these images. They speak of the horrors faced by my fellow Latin Americans in countries dominated by the externally imposed national security doctrine.  Moller's photographs should be shown and debated in all schools and universities to teach tolerance and compassion to those who will hold power in the future." - Sebastião Salgado, social documentary photographer and photojournalist, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador

"...To ensure that the genocide will never be forgotten and that the perpetrators be brought to judgment and punished some day, the content of this book becomes a chapter in the collective memory of a history that has been officially denied.  In the official chronicles, the events captured by Jonathan Moller's camera never occurred.  There was no scorched earth, no massacres, no body dumps and no genocide.  But the bones of the dead prove the opposite. The bones of the dead don't lie."- Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Nobel Peace Laureate

About this edition

• Publisher: powerHouse Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1576872122
• ISBN 13: 9781576872123
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208