Donna De Cesare is an associate professor of documentary photography at the University of Texas at Austin. As a photographer, writer and videographer, she has covered the spread of U.S. gang culture to Central America. “Documenting Migration’s Revolving Door,” her photo essay, appeared in Nieman Reports, Fall 2006.
In her remarks at the “Aftermath” conference, she spoke about taking photographs of those touched by violence during the drug wars in Colombia.
Upon becoming aware of the camera, people often assent to having their picture taken if they imagine that their image will create a bridge to a larger world in which people might care to act if only they knew. However, consent and consequences cannot be taken for granted. Even when you must move quickly and when respect demands a nonintrusive presence, there must always be time to ask for permission. Emotional intimacy, rather than simple physical proximity, makes nuanced images possible. This is achieved when the available time and the camera are used as tools for compassionate interaction. Balancing the public right to know with the right to privacy and the human dignity of those surviving conflict, disaster or stigmatized conditions requires collaboration with the affected individuals or communities.
As journalists and documentary photographers, our role is to witness and to communicate so we can get the stories out to a public. But in the 21st century the collaboration and the conversation must be multi-directional, not only multimedia. In carrying forward the tradition of concerned photography, photojournalists honor specificity with attentiveness. When we are present to record moments in an unfolding crisis, we become a witness to history. We record evidence and we ask the audience to identify with the details and with the protagonists. At other times, we document in the aftermath. As nonfiction artists we also explore the meanings of specific gestures, finding archetypes and symbols which coincide to amplify meaning.
In taking the image at the funeral in Medellín, Colombia, had I not been with the victim’s mother, who told the crowd that she wanted me there, I certainly would have been run out of the cemetery, or worse. The community was caught in De Cesare’s presentation “Witnessing and Picturing Trauma,” which uses many of these same images, is currently featured on the Dart Center Web site.battles among guerrilla groups, gangs and paramilitaries for control of Medellín. The mourners were extremely distrustful of the media. When terror grips a community suffering such violence, hair-trigger rage may erupt, or silence may fall like a dense fog. Part of our work is to earn trust.
How does one responsibly report when danger still exists? One thing is critical; in whatever time you have, you must invest in developing a relationship. When I work on projects that involve survivors of trauma, I look for ways to reduce the potential for harm, to engage in a collaborative relationship, and to make the process as transparent as possible and as helpful to the protagonists under whatever time limitations I face.
Donna De Cesare talks about a collaborative photography project and workshop she directed at a women’s prison in Colombia in which she took pictures of the women and children imprisoned there and provided them with cameras to document their own lives.
Nancy and her six siblings survived one of Colombia's most brutal paramilitary massacres in the village of El Salado. We only had a few hours together for me to learn their story first, and then to make an image. As Nancy led five of her siblings up the hill, each of us noticed the effect of their shados. "Let's hold hands to show we're united," she said
This boy grieves for his friend Einer Metaute, murdered by paramilitaries when he stopped at a café in Medellín, Colombia
Carolina was shy about posing, and so I went away after the interview and watched her from a distance. I caught this gesture as she begins parting her veil of hair, poised to reveal a former child-soldier's longing for love and a normal teenager's life. She lost her right foot in a land mine accident
This 15-year-old boy asked me to take his picture behind the curtain as he spoke about his struggle with HIV-related illness. In all of these images, I was sensitive to the global reach of the Internet. If a child might suffer lethal consequences from making their private story public, then together we found a way to obscure their identity because even in remote areas of Guatemala and Colombia the Internet makes every story available
Haddie and her children became homeless when her husband disappeared. After his body was found, the army claimed that he was a guerilla killed in combat. His sister, Dora, is skeptical. The diagram prepared by the medical examiner showed that he was shot at extremely close range after first being beaten and tortured
After hearing her story of survival on the streets, I asked Rosario, who had been raped by Guatemalan policmen, how she wanted to be photographed. She immediate embraced the lamppost. Her vulnerability in this eerily lit abandoned street and her need for something solid to hold on to make a revealing portrait while obscuring her face
Mariela looks out from her balcony into the darkness. It's more than a decade since her husband, a human rights lawyer, was gunned down as he walked toward his home with his two small daughters
In a group meeting with counselors, Joaquin recalled a dream in which his murdered brother appeared at the window telling him to stop drinking and to live instead for his children. It was the first time that Joaquin was able to speak openly about finding his brother's tortured remains at the body dump known as the botadero where paramilitaries often threw their victim's corpses
Claudia is haunted by memories of finding the butchered bodies of five fellow university students more than a decade ago. Several years later she suffered a mental breakdown—the result of accumulated trauma. She is alive because she was late to the meeting that she was going to attend with her closest friends