Sophos Book News and Amazon Link; Exhibit Information

Guatemala: eterna primavera, eterna tiranía is available in Guatemala at Sophos Bookstore, 4 Avenida, 12-29, zona 10, where it was #1 in June sales! It is also available online at amazon.com.

Here are the links to Sophos and amazon:

*Sophos: http://www.sophosenlinea.com/libro/guatemala-eterna-primavera-eterna-tirania_58606

Also note: The SOPHOS online link is back in full-force, and better than ever:

http://www.sophosenlinea.com/

*amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Guatemala-Eterna-Primavera-Tiran%C3%ADa/dp/9789929803/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279815403&sr=8-1

My heartfelt thanks to my print and radio media colleagues in Guatemala. Your reviews of the book and the photographs are deeply appreciated.

Upcoming reviews in the U.S. include: Harvard Law Alumni Bulletin; ReVista/Harvard publications and Américas Magazine/Americas Society-Council of the Americas (all in October, all online and in print).

Many of you have been emailing me asking about the traveling exhibit. Stay tuned.

Hmm...Ruts in the Road of the Traveling Photo Exhibit.

The traveling photo exhibit of photographs taken from Guatemala: eterna primavera, eterna tiranía has had an interesting little life so far.

The show's inaugural exhibit, in Comalapa, coincided with Agatha, and had a delayed opening.

Then, the photographs were vandalized in Santiago Atitlán. Details on this one are sketchy, but that's as much as I know.

Next, one of the powers that be in Estanzuela insisted that the photographs have a change of venue, for political reasons.

Now, I just learned that the exhibit in Nebaj has been cancelled following the assassination of the mayor's brother.

What next?

Guatemala's thirtysomethings.

Guatemala: eternal primavera, eternal tiranía: Thirty-somethings.

On June 23, the Centro de Cultural de España (CCE) hosted the launch of my book, Guatemala: eternal primavera, eternal tiranía, and the opening of the related exhibit of 38 photographs at (Ex)Céntrico art gallery in downtown Guatemala City. Both events were packed; CCE was SRO, and someone mentioned that the (Ex)Céntrico opening was the largest crowd to date.

For me, the events were a watershed event in two respects.

First, I was happy to have my book published in Guatemala and to be well received. Guatemala: eternal primavera, eternal tiranía is number one on the Guatemala bestseller charts, beating out even Stieg Larsson’s girl wonder, Lisbeth, in June sales at Sophos bookstore. It has been reviewed in every newspaper and featured on the inimitable Ángel Elías radio program (see links below). With respect to the photo exhibits, (Ex)Céntrico’s zone one address is an appropriate venue; the location lends itself to viewing by lots of Guatemalans, not just folks who buy art. A smaller traveling exhibit of the photographs in 12 communities, sponsored by CANEK/CCE, has made the photographs available in places like Nebaj, Zacapa, Xela, and Comalapa. Despite Pacaya, Ágatha, Álex, and sinkholes, CANEK reports that thousands of people have viewed the show; the comment book in Santiago Atitlán contained 198 comments.

I was especially fortunate to have our daughter, Renée Simon Anderson, at the CCE and exhibit opening. Her presence that night – meeting friends, taking snapshots of Mommy and old acquaintances -- meant more than I could have imagined.

Speaking of my 17-year-old daughter, the second watershed event: youth. At the CCE question-and-answer, someone asked if today’s Guatemalan youth is a lost cause. The answer is simple: No.

First, the thirty-something generation largely produced this book: the contributions of Andrés Asturias, Lucía Menéndez, Jorge Castrillón, Pamela Escobar, and Claudia Méndez Arriaza reflect talent, hard work, and commitment. Isaac de los Reyes, Laura Luja, and Johanna Barrios are responsible for the traveling exhibit, which entailed hundreds of hours traveling to highland communities In addition, several “almost thirty-somethings” also contributed: José Fahsen, the general manager of Print Studio, is a businessman who heads Guatemala’s best printing house. He also believed in this book and has good ideas for the next popular edition. Juan Luis Font, managing editor at elPeriódico, was passionate about the idea of resurrecting my two-decade-old English edition for the Spanish version.

In retrospect, perhaps what struck me as most unusual about working with this group of people was that we never actually talked politics. For one thing, everyone was working so hard that there wasn’t much time for chitchat. At the same time, however, everyone in the group was committed to the idea that historical memory is important, and the book was worth it for that reason alone.

Second, I was floored by the crowd that showed up for the CCE presentation and the exhibit, since two-thirds of them were the under-forty crowd. Some of the people there have disappeared relatives, and a few have vague memories of the 1980s, when the war was most intense. However, most of the younger crowd was curious: I watched in amazement as they stood in the CCE for the presentation, or made their way through the exhibit.

George Bernard Show, you’re wrong; youth is not wasted on the young.

Andrés Asturias: Peeling the Onion

Author David Lipsky's comment that "a book has friends before it has readers" seemed created for my book, and no one faster comes to mind than Andrés Asturias, photographer and owner of Estudio/A2 which, according to Daniel Chauche, is the only place to pay for Photoshop in the Isthmus.

Back to the beginning: In June 2009, while I was in Guatemala, Daniel pronounced my low resolution jpgs inferior. We had a meeting with the book's administrative staff and he told us all that we'd have to buy high resolution scans of my Kodachrome transparencies and Photoshop them. Everyone blanched. More money? More time?

Enter Andrés Asturias, a friend and colleague of Daniel. I didn't meet Andrés until September, but he had begun to assist with the technical end of the book early in the process, before we met. Andrés and his team at Estudio A2, Víctor Martínez and Cedrick Arenales, had googled scanning studios in the Washington area and recommended National Geographic, based on its reputation and its proximity to my house. And Daniel told me that Andrés was The Guy to do the Photoshop. Since I was saying "okay" to everything else Daniel was suggesting, there was no reason to break the streak.

The first rendez-vous with Andrés was meet and greet: we were both busy and I was running around Guatemala just before my classes resumed in DC. My only salient memory of that meeting was being assaulted by his three dogs who are the most affectionate canines ever encountered. The second time I met with Andrés, in November, things were getting serious. National Geographic had produced the 170 scans and I took them down to Guatemala along with my original chromes, for Andrés to use as comparison. Andrés and I spent five hours huddled in front of his Mac screen reviewing the images one by one.

What I really like about Andrés's Photoshop method is that he is not trigger-happy with Photoshop or cropping. He's kind of like that one in a million plastic surgeon (not that I would know) who makes you look better and whose work is imperceptible. We went through all the images, stopping only for coffee, and he labelled a light crop here and there, schmutz on the image, and danger signs on the color balance.

On that trip, I realized that Andrés did a lot more than Photoshop enhancement for photographers with boo-boos. As we were packing up, Andrés mentioned that he had photographed Holy Week at the beach. He pulled out a bunch of prints, and I was shocked, since these were great photos. Andrés then mentioned in passing that he had a show coming up in 2010, and then mumbled something about PhotoEspaña. Then, a propos of I forget what, he mentioned that his grandmother was a poet. He gave me a copy of her poems.

I realized that getting to know Andrés is like peeling an onion: it's one layer after another. Andrés's Arena Negra series, which I loved, was going to be a major exhibit in Guatemala, and PhotoEspaña was a highly competitive event. When I mentioned Andrés's grandmother to Minayú Zamora, she informed me that Luz Méndez de la Vega is Guatemala's premier poetess, and one of its most valued poets, period. I read her book twice on the plane home, and realized why.

During my next five trips to Guatemala, Andrés became a huge part of the book in ways unrelated to Photoshop or his grandmother. He contributed big-time to the layout; he and Lucía created a postcard advertising the book, which Andrés distributed all over Guatemala and Antigua; he wrote the legal copyright language at the end (blush; I'm a lawyer); he had Estudio A2 add a map; and we even spent a morning checking out alternative venues for an exhibit. When the Central Cultural de España offered up ExCéntrico for the exhibit, Andrés and his partner, Luisa González-Reiche, a talented graphic artist, took me on a tour of ExCéntrico to check out the space and the flow of photos.

Most significantly, Andrés created a Website for the book which indeed has given a lot of people a little taste of the book in advance. The Website is great, it even includes a "Virtual Museum" which includes a baker's dozen photos of friends and colleagues of mine from the 1980s, with a short description of the role each person played in shaping Guatemala during that period. When I asked Andrés how long he had spent creating the Website, he mumbled (he mumbles a lot when talking about himself), he said "a week, more or less." Luisa sort of snorted. Clearly, "one week" requires some multiplication.

All the work stuff aside, I am also grateful to Andrés and Luisa for opening up their home to me. The line between professional and personal time became blurred, to say the least, in the past few months, and time and again I found myself at their table, eating lunch or spearing carrot cake. In April, Andrés's parents, who are delightful, came over for coffee. His dad insisted that I meet the Italian cultural attaché; the next day, Andrés and I were off to the Italian consulate where we ended up spending two hours with Paola Viero, discussing how further to disseminate the book.

More recently, Andrés printed all the photos for the itinerant exhibition that is traveling to 12 municipalities through August, and the 40-print exhibit that will open at ExCéntrico in zone one on June 23. In addition, we are beginning to talk about the next edition of the book, a smaller, popular edition with more photos and just captions for text. I consider myself lucky to have Andrés on board for this next project. This is a guy with vision, and a guy who is going places.

Daniel "Xox," not "Shoush"

In May 2009, I realized that doing a book meant more than getting money to do it. Tani Adams told me in a phone call that there was one person capable of putting together a photo book in Guatemala. That person was Daniel Chauche, a French-American photographer who has lived in Guatemala since the 1970s.

I did not know much of Daniel's work, but I had admired greatly his black and white portraits that appeared on the cover and interior of Victor Perera's, Guatemala: Unfinished Conquest (University of California Press, 1993). Daniel travels around Guatemala with a portable studio (white sheet, reflector) and different format cameras. While many of his photographs are posed, it is clear that his subjects are comfortable around him. Indeed, it is impossible to walk down the street with Daniel without half a dozen people coming up to greet him.

Daniel is also prolific. In 2009 he had a solo show at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in San Salvador, another at Panza Verde in January 2010, and in September he will have a third solo exhibition at Artecentro de Paiz in Guatemala City. His photographs are part of permanent collections at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Mueseum of Art in Jacksonville, Florida, among others. Since 1983, Daniel's been the owner of the Sombra y Luz photo studio in Antigua, Guatemala. More to the point, he's a master photographer, printer and teacher. Almost every time I'm at Daniel's house in Antigua, a student is in the darkroom, trying to make the perfect negative or an acceptable print. (Daniel is pretty picky.)

In a nutshell, Daniel made clear what one needed to produce a book: high quality scans, designer, Photoshop expert, and a decent printer. Daniel re-wrote the book agreement by insisting that all these parties, first, be part of the process and, second, that they be first-rate. I will never forget the day when the organization administering the funds challenged Daniel on the utility of a designer. "Why do you need a designer?" they asked. Daniel looked at them and, without moving a muscle, replied, "So that page five follows page four." Since April 2009, Daniel has overseen virtually every aspect of this book right down to the publicity; in June 2009 he snagged interviews with Siglo XXI and Diario de Centro América; once I was so hungry that all I wanted to do was eat lunch (I don't care what anyone says about Panza Verde; I like it) and he handed me his cell phone and had me do an interview with Gabriel Arana of Siglo XXI. Then we had a toast.

In truth, what I learned about this process was how much I didn't know about the book process and I realized just how much I had been absent for when my first book was done, and what a different world it is now.

In addition, he introduced me to Guatemalans, including Andrés Asturias, the owner of Estudio A2, who held this book to high standards. Together Andrés -- more on him in the next post -- and Daniel saved this book from gathering dust in the sorry pantheon of photographic disasters.

More on Daniel Chauche's work:

http://www.lamiradadedanielchauche.blogspot.com

http://www.lacuadraonline.com/featured-artists/featured-artist-daniel-chauche-

Book Design..

When the English version of Guatemala: Eterna Primavera, Eterna Tiranía was published in NY 22 years ago, I was living in Guatemala, and I did not pay much attention to the design. I thought designers were people who fretted about details that were not important to me or to what I wanted from a book. I was, of course, wrong.

Lucía Menéndez, who designed Guatemala: Eterna Primavera, Eterna Tiranía, spent two months shepherding the book through its various design stages. This included the photo layout, the photos' interface with the text, the sequencing and "rhythm" of the text and photos together, and delivering a camera-ready product to Print Studio last week.

Guatemala is unusual if not unique in that it contains equal parts of photo and text. Although good photos can -- and probably should -- stand on their own, Guatemala was so under-reported in the press in the 1980s that I wanted my book to be a compendium of testimonies. To that end, I devised three levels of reading: short bold-faced captions for the photo crowd; long captions for people who wanted solid information without having to slog through a lot of text; and the text for the hardcore readers.

As a result, the English version of the text was too busy: there were photos, double-spaced text and footnotes on the same page. Lucía's version of the book is a huge improvement in lots of ways.

First, Lucía gave the photos their due by blowing up the verticals to cover the page, and by running ten photos as double-page spreads. (There is a double-page of Vinicio at the beach; as Frank Goldman put it, "¡Qué pu@#$%%^ foto!" (not homage to my photography skills but to Vinicio + Speedo + gun across two pages.) She and Andrés Asturias also made photo combinations that never would have occurred to me: Mico Sandoval Alarcón, the former head of the "movement of organized violence" juxtaposed with a beleaguered civil patroller holding a torn copy of the 1985 Guatemalan Constitution, and a near-naked worker hauling sugar opposite a near naked Mardi Grass reveler at Ad Astra disco.

Second, Lucía used a cleaner typeface: Chronicle text. The captions are more compact but, at the same time, more readable than those in the U.S. version. It's clean and aesthetically pleasant.

Third, Lucía killed herself putting the book together. It is hard enough to design a photography book, but try doing a photography book where the text could be a separate tome. That was hard. I think I owe Lucía 100 beers at the Bar Central, or six months of therapy as a result. Lucía also let a whole bunch of people -- Daniel, Andrés, me -- breathe down her neck during the last part of the design process. I don't know a lot of designers, but the ones I do know keep humanity at arm's length while they work. Lucía's accommodation was unusual.

Finally, Lucía has a long-standing relationship with Print Studio, where the book was printed last week. This helped a lot, because when changes had to be made, either in the photos or the text, Lucía's relationship with PS management made a difference.

Next post: Photoshop and Andrés Asturias; Daniel Chauche at the printer

The Yellow Shirts

Here's a picture of me with Andrés Asturias, boy photo wonder, and Lucía Menéndez, girl design wonder, in Lucía's loft. The yellow shirt coordination was unintentional, but it does prove we all have good taste in ... color.