The Macondo photographic project proposes a strategy of education and peace building based on a knowledge of the memory of what happened and proactively intervene in the reconciliation of Colombian society. A project that is born of a visual corpus gathered for about 15 years by the photographer Alvaro Ybarra Zavala in different regions of the country and that has become one of the main photographic archives on the recent history of the conflict in Colombia.
In a context of open conflict like the Colombian one, the memory can not be but essentially controversial: the memory is and will continue being a field of tensions within the society and between the society and the institutions. When memory becomes a hegemonic account, it becomes a neighbor of totalitarianism. But when it is recognized in its diversity, memory is one of the practices with the greatest democratizing vocation.
AYZ Contact Sheet Prints tell as much of a story in their own right as the images they birth.
With the rise of digital photography, the contact sheet has, in many ways, been relegated an anachronis but the insight it can provide into a photographer’s process is something timeless.
