infoEl Salvador
Saturday 4 February to Saturday 25 March 2006
Work of 30 Photographers
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. In his speech accepting the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter looked back at the 1970s and 80s and the casual denials of US covert military intervention in Latin America. But the outrages did not go unmarked. In 1983 thirty international photojournalists covering the civil war in El Salvador contributed to a book and exhibition aimed at raising awareness of what was happening.
The country had been ruled by a repressive military dictatorship for years, but a coup d'etat in 1979 led to a 12 year civil war. The assassination of Archbishop Romero and the murder of three US nuns and a lay worker drew international attention, events that figure strongly in the exhibition. It opens up, however, on a much wider picture: the daily lives of the campesinos; military training and deployments, executions and massacres; the work of the death squads; the lives of the guerrillas and the liberated zone. Assembled by Susan Meiselas and Harry Mattison, with a text by Carolyn Forché, it is harrowingly eloquent. In the context both of current US activity in the Middle East and of the war of words with Hugo Chávez' Venezuala, it is disturbingly relevant.
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