Pubdate: Fri, 15 Feb 2013 Source: Houston Chronicle (TX) Copyright: 2013 Houston Chronicle Publishing Company Division, Hearst Newspaper Contact: http://www.chron.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/198 Author: Molly Glentzer AN EMOTIONAL, ARTFUL SPIN ON MEXICO'S DRUG WAR Fernando Brito, the photo editor of El Debate de Culiacan, a newspaper in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, was in Houston last week for a talk related to FotoFest's exhibit "Cronicas: Seven Contemporary Mexican Artists Confront the Drug War." A slender man with an outsized black beard, he wore big, fashionable black glasses lined in orange, a cerulean blue running jacket and track shoes with his jeans. A big chain dangled from his belt to a pocket. It was a rather flashy look for such a quiet man. Brito, the only photojournalist of the group, has 13 color prints in the exhibit from a series called "Your Steps Were Lost in the Landscape." Each shows a corpse, or several corpses, from a slight distance, within an epic-looking landscape. In one or two cases, you might mistake the figures as guys taking siestas in uncomfortable positions. Brito photographs them with dignity, never close up on the faces, because he wants you to know they could be anyone - or Everymen. When he's asked to speak about them, he always talks about the problem of the drug war, not the imagery. "I want to denounce what has happened. I'm just a citizen with an opportunity to do something more," he said. He studied marketing but, with jobs scarce, joined the newspaper in 2004. Photography was just a hobby until then, and he was plunged more directly into the drug war than he had been by just living in one of Mexico's most violent states. "When I went to work at a newspaper, I began to realize you have a responsibility because all you do they're going to think is true," he said. In 2006, he also began shooting for himself at crime sites, after he'd photographed the requisite gruesome close-ups the paper wanted. "Really, I don't know how this happened," he said as he walked through the hallway, viewing his prints. "I'm never alone with the dead bodies. There are always police there." Nor did he know what he'd do with the work he was amassing until a friend who was publishing a book showed him fictionalized images of bodies in fields. "I have the same thing, but real," Brito told his friend. He's still photographing, with no shortage of material. In 2004, there were about 300 murders in Sinaloa. Last year, there were 1,600. "Always, I am afraid. That is the most important thing in my work," he said. Brito's family, which includes his parents, four brothers, nine nephews and a niece, has a food business; they make chorizo and other meat products. He's 37 and has a girlfriend, but they won't have children, he said, because they don't want to raise boys in an environment where young men, increasingly, choose careers with the cartel. He has no desire to leave, however, because it's home. "Culiacan is not a beautiful city. We don't have a beach, tourists. But the people are great. They are happy people," he said. We came upon Jorge Arreola Barraza's photographs of big, empty billboards above the streets of Ciudad Juarez. "These are fantastic," Brito said. "This is what they talk about there because they don't have work. Juarez is like a ghost town." Then he pointed toward Miguel Aragon's beautiful burnt residue-embossed prints, which turn newspaper images of murdered bodies into creamy, almost abstract artworks. Aragon, too, is from Juarez. "These are crazy," Brito said, meaning it in a good way. "I am not an artist, but I know a lot of artists." Curator Jennifer Ward said she thought Aragon's prints look like the disappeared - "that last impression left in your memory." You'd have to look really hard to see that Aragon's "Severed" originated with a photograph of two severed heads. "This would be real difficult to look at if it were a color photograph," Ward said. Another set of prints by Aragon features large-scale, blown-up portraits of corpses from Juarez news photos. Using an electric drill, he's punched thousands of tiny holes into the spaces of each digital dot - an angry technique that reflects the aggression portrayed. As different as their work is, Brito and Aragon are similar in that they don't place blame on their subjects. Ward explained, "A life is a life. It doesn't matter if they're from a cartel or innocent bystanders." She limited the multimedia exhibit to artists who live in Mexico or have family there and have to deal with the drug war daily. All are in their 30s, so they were at an important stage in their development as artists during the ultra-violent period from 2006 to 2010. Much of the work is photo-or video-based, but Ward avoided traditional photojournalism. "Sometimes, photography can be didactic," she said. "I wanted to show emotional responses." Ivete Lucas, who's from Monterrey, lives in Houston now. "She's the one artist in the show who points a finger at everybody," Ward said. The centerpiece of Lucas' installation is a video compiled from 500 found bits of news footage, online media and pop-cultural video. The screen is framed by newspaper clippings with sometimes sly references to the governor of Nuevo Leon. At the base, a concrete brick wall re-creates a message left by cartel members after they murdered the governor's guards. "Palas por Pistolas" is the exhibit's most conceptual work. It consists of a row of pristine shovels from a collection of 1,527 by Pedro Reyes of Culiacan. Each shovel is made from a gun he collected during a donation drive and melted down. One of the shovels will be used to plant a tree in Guadalupe Plaza Park, 2311 Runnels, at 9 a.m. Saturday. "He represents hope," Ward said. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D