[Zapatistas]
Photograph
[Zapatistas]
From Chiapas, The end of silence
1994
Gelatin silver print
Image: 20.2 × 31.5 cm (7 15/16 × 12 3/8 in.)
Paper: 27.6 × 35.5 cm (10 7/8 × 14 in.)
Gift of the FiftyCrows Foundation, 2015
2015.0133.0360
Inscriptions verso TL (pencil): 17
verso BR (pencil): Turok 17
verso BR (pencil): Turok 17
TextOn January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation entered San Cristóbal, the cultural capital of the state of Chiapas, to declare war on the federal government. They were protesting the North American Free Trade Agreement for the deleterious impact it had had on Mexico’s indigenous peoples. Antonio Wallace Turok made the first photographs of the uprising, as columns of armed insurgents began their occupation of the city. As if making a direct reference to Turok’s powerful photographs, Zapatista leader Subcommandante Marcos commented in 1996:
“The Indians of the Mexican southwest—Tzotziles, Tzeltales, Choles, Tojolabales, Zoques, Mames—used to appear only in museum images, tourist guides, and handicraft ads. The camera’s eye sought them out as anthropological curiosities for the colorful detail of a long-ago past. The rifle’s eye has made the camera see them in a different way.”
“The Indians of the Mexican southwest—Tzotziles, Tzeltales, Choles, Tojolabales, Zoques, Mames—used to appear only in museum images, tourist guides, and handicraft ads. The camera’s eye sought them out as anthropological curiosities for the colorful detail of a long-ago past. The rifle’s eye has made the camera see them in a different way.”
