About

Alexander L. Fattal is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. His scholarship and creative work focus on representations of the Colombian armed conflict and the efforts to build a lasting peace in Colombia. He approaches his work with an interdisciplinary perspective, combining socio-cultural anthropology, media studies, and the documentary arts. His research and projects explore the complex dynamics of conflict and peacebuilding in the Andean region, contributing to a deeper understanding of these issues through both academic and creative lenses.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Anthropology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Humanities
• Library science
• Art
• History
• Media studies

Selected publications

• Documentary

  2025-01-01

  otherSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Un palimpsesto de la guerra entre vocales que se desvanecen

  Revista Colombiana de Antropología · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  El conjunto de imgenes y textos que conforman el trabajo "Tiempo y silencio", de Juan Manuel Echavarra, tiene una cualidad sinestsica, pues logra evocar mltiples sentidos a partir de un solo estmulo visual.En este sentido, resaltamos la centralidad del sonido, desde el silencio del ttulo hasta las imgenes de vocales y nmeros en espacios escolares que nos invitan a leer, incluso en voz alta, o a imaginar las voces de las infancias a las que originalmente estaban dirigidas.Ms que un silencio, Echavarra seala un silenciamiento.Como observadores, presenciamos el desvanecimiento de las unidades bsicas del habla en escuelas abandonadas, mientras que imaginamos cmo fueron habitadas en un pasado no muy lejano por filas de pupitres y primeras infancias.Las dos temporalidades que se forman, la que nos muestra la imagen y el pasado que nos imaginamos, constituyen a

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• <i>Purple Sea</i> directed by Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, <scp>LightDox</scp> 2020, 67 minutes

  Visual Anthropology Review · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  I see a red light inside the helicopter./Are they filming us?/Where will the images end up?/On youtube (sic)?/Or television?/Regular news or breaking news?/What do you call us?/Refugees?/Criminals?/Victims?/Or just numbers?/Fuck you all!/Stop filming! These lines come toward the end of the carefully crafted monologue that directors Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed layer as subtitles on the distressing amphibious footage that comprises Purple Sea (2020). Amel recorded Purple Sea while shipwrecked and bobbing in a life preserver, overboard in the eastern Mediterranean, herself a Syrian refugee desperate to make it to Germany. The experimental documentary is a literal and figurative immersion in one of the most notorious refugee passages, in the waters between western Turkey and the Greek island of Lesvos. The moment near the end of the film from which the above quote is taken is the pièce de résistance of a refugee cinema that mobilizes film in an autoethnographic rumination on both the medium and a contemporary world that propels life—in this case, one's own—toward the edge of death. After Amel utters this series of questions and exclamations in the monologue, her camera, and her wrist to which it is strapped, reemerges from the Mediterranean. In the jerky footage now filmed from above the sloshing waterline we see the helicopter above and glimpse heads propped just above sea level by blue and orange life preservers branded Yamaha. We hear occasional screams for help and piece together the visual fragments, as we have grown accustomed to doing through the first fifty minutes of the film. The helicopter stops its forward motion just above the migrants. The waves of the ocean are rolling. It is nearly dusk. The camera ducks below the surface again for another five minutes in which the screams are muffled. We see the by-now-familiar limbs dangling in the current. A little more laconic, poetic monologue, and then a card of intertitles that ends the film tersely notes that 274 people were rescued, but 42 human beings died during the voyage. Perhaps the dead include some of the people we have drifted next to for the last 67 minutes. The card of cold information confirms the tragic connotation of the film's title; though, of course, the filmmaker has survived. Many refugees fleeing conflicts around the globe dare to make this journey, but those who are fleeing the violence of Syria's tattered sovereignty and, at the time, Bashar Al-Assad's repressive efforts to piece it together again are the ones who most frequently attempt this Mediterranean voyage. The footage from the film comes entirely from the camera that Amel Alzakout has fastened to her wrist. The vast majority of its long takes are shot below the sea's surface, a floating frame that includes a strap of herringbone cloth (a belt come loose?), a black blouse with red butterflies, a fanny pack, and legs in jeans and sweatpants. These headless bodies are not vertical, like sperm whales sleeping. Instead, they float sidelong, legs barely kicking feet that float in shoes whose laces are gradually loosening. If you are watching on a laptop maybe you too will find yourself rotating your computer 78 degrees counterclockwise and then 41 degrees clockwise as you grapple with this unsettling footage. After the first half of the film, one starts to feel as if we too are suspended in salty water. Combined with Amel's dulcet whispers of voiceover, the images have a meditative effect—even though we are increasingly aware that the decontextualized images we are seeing are the antithesis of the tranquil scenes that vacationers to Greek islands consume as the frolic in the Aegean Sea. The tension between panic and poise lends the film a growing electricity that numbs and shocks at the same time (Figure 1). The monologue is careful not to reveal too much too quickly. First, the sensorial and embodied effects of the footage must be established. The staccato, poetic monologue consists of a series of short enunciations separated from each other, offering clues to the first-person narrative of displacement, political limbo in Turkey, love found at a protest in Istanbul, and separation on account of the whimsical laws of asylum bureaucracy. These threads only loosely weave together over the course of the film. The story is assembled in a way that is purposefully fragmented but not cryptic, an artful complement to the power of the embodied camerawork. As we watch the long takes, we struggle to make out the brand written on a leg of sweatpants; we dwell on the orange stitching along the seams of jeans that seem to match the life vests' orange. These details have haptic effects. Our imagination lingers so long on what it must be like to be submerged in street clothes that we start to feel those sensations. Unconsciously, I began to adjust my own pantlegs while watching. Was I reacting to the vicarious drifting wedgy of life preservers clipped through floating legs? While we cannot know what the heads cut off in these underwater scenes are thinking, Amel gives us just enough clues to her own story, which shifts between the emergency of the moment and reflections refracted through both memories and a wandering imagination. Amel reviews the professional choices she's made in life. “In Damascus, I study journalism. / I want to become a war correspondent. / What a stupid idea. / Somehow now, I've become one.” Filming her journey is a surreal confluence of the professional and the personal. She is not alone in wanting to document her passage to Fortress Europe. “People take selfies. / I take one as well.” The smuggler, we are told, is a film producer and has a poster of a film that won an award from Cannes in his office. Mediation is reflexively centered in this odyssey of the stateless. Why, Amel and Khaled seem to be asking, would we leave the representation of refugees' lives to professional filmmakers shooting in ultra-high definition—the Gianfranco Rosi's of the world? The filmmakers claim their own voice in the expanding field of refugee cinema and in so doing broaden the space for self-representation in a genre in which the long-standing one-way gaze of non-refugee cameraperson to refugee subject is upended. A question simmers throughout: To what extent has the prospect of filming the journey inflected the filmmaker's decision to undertake it? “I fasten the camera to my wrist. I film this trip for you.” We see a phone in a waterproof sleeve, it will cue a later piece of monologue. “Is my mobile ringing? Is that you calling? Do you know that I am drowning?” These questions, though voiced from Amel and addressed to Khaled, echo out to wider publics, the viewers of the film, the consumers of news stories about refugees, the public sphere that knows that there are many Amels out there; knows the routes migrants take; knows the risks they run. Not only Khaled but the institutions of the Fortress Europe could track the cell signals to mount a more efficient search and rescue apparatus for migrants in the Mediterranean—but they don't (quite the opposite, see Schack & Witcher, 2021). The directors, wisely, do not generalize. The strength of Purple Sea is its specificity, its situatedness—both in the water and in Amel's voice-over-mind. Her thoughts mostly wander to her partner, co-director, Khaled, who has procured a German visa and is rebuilding his life. In preparing to make the trip, Amel sends him her cat, remarking: “No visa required.” She could wait in limbo for 2 years or more in the asylum bureaucracy, but that's not consistent with who she is: “You know me. / I can't wait. / If I wait, I get sleepy. / I can't allow myself to sleep. / I must stay awake.” This is a sojourn of love, of the messy, indeterminate variety, shot through with a longing for reunion and doubts expressed through dueling visions articulated by the voiceover. The first is of them together on the grass in Berlin, brainstorming what they will name their daughter. The second is him holding the hand of his daughter—named after her—and greeting his wife. But it is the vision of them together that she turns to at the end, when the trip is at its most harrowing. When the woman in the black blouse with red butterflies who we have been floating next to for the past hour is screaming, unsure whether her daughter is alive or dead, Amel closes her eyes to escape, to imagine laughing with Khaled in Berlin. She is coping. She is telling her story in a unique and indelible way. She has brought us to hell, her own, but in doing so has enabled us to feel, even if fleetingly, the horror of refugees' plight. Though we know nothing about the lives of the 315 other people who boarded the boat with her, we can begin—metonymically, through Amel—to sense the texture of their tragedies. By mixing the sensorial and the personal, the embodied and the psychological, the directors achieve something extraordinarily rare, a profound sensory auto-ethnography. In contrast to the logophobia of Leviathan (2012), the filmic standard-bearer of sensory ethnography, Purple Sea offers a thoughtful conjunction of an embodied camera and a personal voice, creating a haptic experience with a politics that is personal, that is vulnerable. While both Leviathan and Purple Sea are fragmentary and convey hardship at sea, the latter does not devolve into a spectacular voyeurism situated at the intersection of academic trends. Purple Sea is the epitome of what anthropologist Raminder Kaur and film studies scholar Mariagiulia Grassilli have called for, a “Fifth Cinema” that is “mobile, unstable, instantaneous, fragmented, displaced and hybrid bricolage” and involves refugees in its production (2019, 3). Embedded in Amel and Khaled's documentary is a clear politics against the prevailing representational conventions. Not only “Fuck you all! Stop filming!” but also “Why do we all scream in English?” Purple Sea harnesses the embodied, haptic power of sensory ethnography but without the fear of language, without the academic polemicizing, and without the luxury of retreating to a personal distance from the subject matter. The result is a powerful reminder of the potential of experimental documentary. The author would like to thank Pepe Rojo for his generative reflections about refugee cinema and acknowledge the students in his undergraduate class “The Refugee Experience Through the Documentary Lens” for sharing their own reactions to the Purple Sea.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Between Guerrilla Warfare and Media Warfare

  Current Anthropology · 2024-09-11

  article1st authorCorresponding

  At the cusp of disarmament, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC-EP) held a giant weeklong media event in the middle of its territory along the northern edge of the Amazon basin. This photo essay explores the anxious moments of venturing into a mixed realm where they wore both military fatigues and civilian clothes as well as the group’s efforts to control the media even as it was being manipulated by it. My photographs strive to capture the tensions coursing through the event itself and the liminal moment of the FARC-EP’s then-imminent disarmament.

  PublisherDOI

• The Moral Vision and Moral Performance of Photojournalist Jesús Abad Colorado

  2024-03-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The images of photojournalist Jesús Abad Colorado are increasingly seared in the collective consciousness of Colombians. They are unflinching looks at the suffering wrought by the armed conflict but also a testament to human resilience. The photos are impressive in small sets and overwhelming as an oeuvre. This chapter reflects on Abad Colorado’s role as a witness and a voice for peace. It looks back on his career from a pinnacle, the exhibition “The Witness” and a feature-length documentary of the same name and analyzes Abad Colorado as a unique moral voice who iterates upon the long-established trope of “witnessing” in documentary photography. The chapter argues that through a combination of his images and his outspoken personae, which increasingly mobilizes religious tropes, he effectively transcends entrenched partisan divisions and has earned a special relevance in Colombia’s public sphere. The research also suggests that Abad Colorado’s work has served as an inspiration for the photographic effervescence that has taken place in Colombia since a peace agreement was signed by the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, in 2016.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘Working with Grievous Images’, a special issue of <i>History of Photography</i> : Q&amp;A from questions posed by the editors Daniel Foliard and Sean Willcock to authors Pierre Schill, Susie Protschky, Nancy Rushohora, Alexander L Fattal and Andrés F. Caicedo Sierra, and Elissa Mailänder

  History of Photography · 2023-10-02

  articleOpen access

  International audience

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• A Necropolitical Visual Regime: Banditry in Colombia, 1958–1964

  History of Photography · 2023-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  From 1958 to 1964 in Colombia, during the first years of the partisan power-sharing agreement known as the National Front, roving crews of gunmen labelled ‘bandits’ who had been mobilised and then abandoned by party elites terrorised local populations in the countryside. We track the gruesome photographic record of that violence: first, as it was produced by bandits who recruited photography in their bids for local sovereignty; second, as it circulated through government and media accounts that turned those same images back on the bandits as part of the military’s hunt for them as outlaws; and third, as a group of scholar-activists used them in academic publications that sought to shock the public into conscious concern and stimulate a sociological discussion about what caused and fuelled the violence. We argue that disparate uses of the same type of images – portraits of bandits and the cadavers, often mutilated, of their victims – constituted a necropolitical visual regime in which the elite consensus between government and press most effectively harnessed the photographs’ affective charge and channelled it into the pacification effort.

  PublisherDOI

• Guests of the Guerrilla: Integrated Spectacle and Disintegrating Peace, an Ethnographic Analysis of the FARC's Tenth (and Final?) Guerrilla Conference

  Journal of Latin American Studies · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract During a week in September of 2016, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC) held its tenth guerrilla conference, the Décima, in the plains of Yarí in southern Colombia. The guerrilla group blew the event open to the media, orchestrating a festival cum eco-conflict-tourism extravaganza to mark its transition to legal politics. This photo/ethnographic analysis of the Décima illuminates the FARC's symbolic and discursive formation at a pivotal transitional moment and how the group imagined its political possibilities at the cusp of its demobilisation. By engaging with Guy Debord's concept of ‘integrated spectacle’, I argue that the FARC's vanguardist structure led it to brand itself as the leader of a broad political mobilisation, even as it struggled to retain the allegiance of its former combatants. The article considers the ongoing relevance of the integrated spectacle for scholars and activists and opens a path for further research into politics of spectacle in Latin America.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Review: <i>Verde</i>, by Federico Rios Escobar

  Afterimage · 2021-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Verde is an extraordinary book of photographs of the insurgents of Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) as they experienced their last two years as a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla insurgency (2015–16) and their first two years as demobilized ex-combatants starting to build new lives for themselves (2017–18). Published by force of will and strength of social networks, notably the Instagram account of its author, photojournalist Federico Rios Escobar (@historiassencillas), the book’s crowdsourced existence defies sophisticated structures of muting critical voices and suppressing critical visions. As one of the premiere freelancers in northern South America, a preferred stringer for the New York Times, and a brand ambassador for Sony, Rios Escobar is better positioned than most to swim against the current of image/imagination management in Colombia, though certainly not immune from receiving his share of accusatory blowback and rejection.In an interview with Contagio Radio, Rios Escobar described the process of looking for a publisher for Verde: “I knocked on the door of many presses and all I got was the door slammed in my face—obstacles, problems based on fears about the politics of committing to a project that talked about the FARC, worries about reprisals from the government and private companies.”1 In the book’s acknowledgments, Rios Escobar thanks those who rejected him for stoking his motivation. I too would like to thank them, for Verde is a much more interesting book than a commercial press would have produced.Designed with Raya Editorial, an independent publisher of artisanal photobooks based in Manizales, Colombia, Verde is thoughtfully sequenced and exquisitely produced. Its folios are stitched and glued together bare bones, sans spine. Between the soft covers are three hundred and twenty-four pages of color images, not counting the three foldout panoramic shots.The jacket, a thin olive-green sleeve, envelops the book not unlike the way a banana leaf enfolds tamales from the region where the FARC was founded in the early 1960s. Once unfolded, the front side of the jacket, the olive-green cover, back cover, and flaps, unwraps into a large map of Colombia on which Rios Escobar’s wife had hand-marked where he traveled. This personally annotated cartography testifies to the photojournalist’s intrepid journeys through an ample sample of the country’s remote topography (and for those who know the geography of the Colombian conflict, also signals the risks Rios Escobar faced). The interior/second-side of the jacket, which is only visible once the holder gives in to the temptation to fold off the jacket, reveals a thumbnail key to the books’ images that includes captions in Spanish and English.2 Once the cover-cum-covering is laid out, the reader has a key, a map, and a sense that what awaits has been patiently gathered and thoughtfully assembled.As mentioned, I join Rios Escobar in thanking the photo publishers who turned down his book proposal, preferring to stick with their well-worn formula of cautious complicity in the ideological order. The hegemony of the photobook publishing tradition manifests at Christmastime in Colombia when glossy photobooks, which the largest presses finance through preorders from banks, airlines, and insurance companies, are gifted to segments of their payroll and clientele as gestures of good cheer. In the early 2000s, I approached the most illustrious of these picture publishers as a young gringo who had been teaching photography to youth displaced by Colombia’s armed conflict. After a short presentation, the publishing magnate said that the project “was for Europe” and that I should talk to the Dutch or some such socially concerned collective who cares about “these things.”3Since historic peace negotiations between the FARC and the Colombian government began in 2012 (and lead to an accord in 2016), more and more photographers have taken advantage of the expansion of discursive space to move their long-term projects toward public dissemination. Rios Escobar has the humility to acknowledge that his photographs are part of this broader trend and made possible by the FARC’s relative openness to a steadier stream of journalists in the mid-2010s. In interviews he often cites his place in a community of imagemakers in Colombia (nationals and foreigners), many of whom have also transited through FARC camps. Though his peers weave images of the guerrillas into larger projects about the conflict, Verde is the most exhaustive visual photo-documentary treatment of this population to date, and it has an understated visual clairvoyance that offers deep glimpses into life in the FARC.It is not surprising that Verde has generated extensive reviews and author interviews in Colombia. In his growing recognition, Rios Escobar follows in the footsteps of photojournalist Jesús Abad Colorado, a fellow paisa who also sought distance from the patronage of the Colombian press and has been internationally celebrated for his body of work about the war’s many victims.Rios Escobar’s tome is light on text, Spanish and English side-by-side. Alejandro Gaviria Uribe, the Minister of Health and Social Protection of Colombia from 2012 to 2018, when the peace accord with the FARC was negotiated and its implementation began, a former rector of Universidad de los Andes, and left-of-center presidential hopeful, wrote the lackluster three-page introduction. Its paragraphs are punctuated by imprecisions (e.g., “the photographs are arranged chronologically”) and vacuities (e.g., “Federico knows that his images say everything that needs to be said.”). Yet it ends gracefully, observing that Rios Escobar’s vision is “an aesthetic gaze that becomes an ethical one”—a point that I will engage with shortly. Rios Escobar only offers a one-page reflection at the end of the book and two pages of acknowledgments. A handful of text boxes dot the layout, short contextual blurbs that are too short to be illuminating and that interrupt the visual immersion that is book’s strong suite—the only questionable choice in what is otherwise an impeccably designed photobook.Although most images in Verde are stand-alone shots, Rios Escobar integrates mini photo-essays into the book. By doing so he gently pushes on the soft barrier between the genres of photojournalism and social documentary. These photo-essays include: (1) a set of portraits of FARC fighters standing behind the contents of their packs splayed out for the camera; (2) instant, Polaroid-style portraits of FARC fighters in fatigues with the age of their recruitment written across the footer of the picture; (3) portraits of individuals in both military and civilian clothes; and (4) a set of pictures that details stools that FARC fighters sit on.These mini photo-essays are simple explorations of existential curiosities, at once tangential and fundamental to Rios Escobar’s broader visual exploration of the FARC. For instance, the series of the contents of individual rebel’s packs splayed out on a table begins to respond to basic existential questions such as: What is it like to live carrying your possessions on your shoulders through jungles and forests? What is interesting in this series of twelve images is the variation. Beyond the rolled-up clothes, toiletries, and tin pots, the contents of the packs bear traces of the fighter’s responsibilities and idiosyncrasies. Alias Brenda carried a MacBook Pro as well as a postcard. Alias Felipe only lugged the basics, including a headlamp for night marches. Medicines, pictures of her child, and a radio were what alias Karen lugged around with her. Alias Karina read Voz, the communist press. Calculators, hair clippers, a walkie talkie, and quite a few personal grooming products lie next to rifles of all sizes. The short series does an efficient job of juxtaposing everyday banality and the permanent sense of survival and menace that are substrates of guerrilla life, demystifying the FARC in the process.The twelve pages of Polaroid-style instant photos of guerrillas in the western Andes are the least visually interesting images in the book. Often, they were gifted by Rios Escobar as souvenirs to the guerrilla subjects in a gesture of reciprocity. The handwriting on each is of the person’s name and the age at which she or he joined the insurgency. Five people entered the group at eleven years old and one at twelve years old. The numbers beg the obvious question to viewers far from the Colombian countryside: What does it mean to come of age in the FARC? By indirectly posing the question, this series fits into the broader ethic of the book, inviting viewers to slow down and consider the human experience of life in the insurgency.In the middle of Verde we see six pages of shots of the folding stools that guerrillas use to rest on. Most are personalized with a name and colorful stitching on their fabric seats, personalized touches that include cartoon figures, hand-sewn animals, or embroidered doodles. Others are the patches of military units, perhaps signaling that they were taken in combat. The stools evoke the cute, the cuddly, and the deadly—the juxtaposition a motif that runs throughout the book.Finally, eight pages of portraits of guerrillas posing in fatigues with their rifles at the ready are contraposed with those same guerrillas in civilian clothes. This sequence comes toward the end of the book in the period of the group’s disarmament in 2017. Like the other mini photo-essays, this one raises basic questions: To what extent can the military and civilian be so abruptly separated?These photo-essayistic sets strike quiet, contemplative tones and in this sense are consistent with the majority of the images in Verde. The book is comprised entirely of horizontal images that tend to splay across the fold and bleed to the edge of the page, yet the blood of the conflict is largely kept out of the frame. Yes, one of the first images is blood-splattered leaves, and there is a scene of an injured government soldier being helicoptered out of a war zone, but the focus of Verde is on the humanity of guerrilla fighters as individuals as opposed to their inhumanity as participants in a war that had been degenerating for decades.In a 2016 interview in the New York Times, Rios Escobar said that he works to “portray the intimate and make photos that are not very aggressive.”4 This takes me back to Gaviria’s appraisal that Rios Escobar’s gaze is ultimately an ethical one. The ethical impulse is clearly to humanize the guerrillas, which is the underlying strength of Verde. By shying away from “aggressive” photos—a default representation of the FARC in Colombia—Rios Escobar managed to get closer and closer. He appears to have been drawn to private moments: a coed group of guerrillas playing (flirting?) while bathing together in a river, a woman fighter tending her bed at night, a young couple spooning, a couple dancing in the middle of a celebration, another couple that appears to be preparing to make love. These images of love and tenderness are the most upsetting to the established order. For if the default representation of the FARC for decades has been as an internal enemy, a collective of inhuman monsters per national security doctrine, how can they love?The ethical impulse to humanize the FARC is why Verde’s publication by a major press in Colombia was always off the table and the coffee tables where such books rest. Partisans on the right might quip that the book fails to depict the suffering the group has caused, whitewashing the rebels’ image. From the narrow perspective of one publication, such criticism would not be without its merits, but given the broader media ecology in which it operates, Verde is an important corrective to an elite-dominated view of the world that has failed to recognize the humanity not only of FARC fighters but also the working class (urban and rural) and Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities. That disregard was on full display in the national strike protests in the spring and summer of 2021 when the Colombian Armed Forces, which have spared no expense to present themselves as humanitarian saviors, as I have shown elsewhere,5 cracked down with deadly brutality on protestors, especially Afro-Colombian and Indigenous protesters in the western Andes.Those protests were a visceral reminder that Colombia has much more pressing concerns than the FARC and its legacy, primarily the structural inequalities that led to the insurgency in the first place. In this sense, the publication of Verde might seem poorly timed, a deep dive into life in the FARC at the exact moment when society is eager to move on from the reductive logic of “all against the FARC” so expertly crafted by former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez in the early 2000s. But, to the contrary, the book is right on time to sound an urgent call to help clear that discursive haze and move toward a nonviolent, inclusive democracy, a project always deferred by the crises of the country’s ever churning war machine.The final two sequences of the book are telling. The penultimate documents the BioAnorí expedition in which ten former FARC guerrillas led fifty biologists through its former territory. In two weeks they discovered fourteen new species of plants, cockroaches, rats, and lizards.6 It is at once logical and extraordinary that the FARC has such deep ecological knowledge, which, thanks to the peace agreement, it could make accessible to the country’s scientific community. While the partnership hints at utopian possibilities, the window for realizing those possibilities in the short to medium term shut quickly, giving way to a more ominous political horizon. Now that the FARC has left these regions, who will be the stewards of this biodiversity as extractive industries look to expand? Will other armed groups move in to seize the territory they ceded?The answer to the last question, as those who have been following post–peace accord politics know, is yes. Narco-paramilitaries, narco-FARC dissident groups, and the National Liberation Army (a smaller guerrilla group that has expanded since 2017) have all sought to fill the all too predictable vacuum that, in theory, the government was supposed to prevent by expanding its services. Of all his adventures, Rios Escobar describes his time covering a FARC dissident group that broke with leadership to keep fighting after the peace accord in northwestern Colombia as the most harrowing. If there is one image in Verde that summarizes the current state of Colombia’s layered predicaments, it’s of a child doing homework on the floor by the light of the only lightbulb in the house, with the uniform of a FARC dissident lying on the floor a few feet away. It does not have the visual impact of the foldout panoramic shot of a sole of a guerrilla mounted on a horse in a river struggling to make headway against the current as the water creeps up the neck of the horse and toward that of the rider, but it encapsulates the predicament of the country with a blend of empathy, tragedy, and hope.It is clear from many of the photos in Verde that Rios Escobar has the gift of a photojournalist’s eye, able to visually compose masterpieces with startling frequency. My favorite image, visually speaking, is one of the foldout panoramic shots that at first appears to be a simple yet strikingly beautiful palette of the jungle’s greens, a landscape shot, until you look at it long enough to notice six FARC fighters expertly camouflaged in the foreground (a justification of the book’s title in a single image). But beyond having an expert eye, Rios Escobar evinces a strong social concern and transmits a sociological sensibility. Verde is a testament to what happens when eye, heart, and brain are all clicking. To the consternation of the gatekeepers of the country’s fraying mediated hegemony, it is bound to be a classic in Colombia.

  PublisherDOI

• The Quick: David MacDougall and Reflections on Relative Speed

  eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2021-06-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel Foliard

  Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones

  3 shared

• Elissa Mailänder

  Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po

  2 shared

• Andrés F. Caicedo Sierra

  2 shared

• Diego A Garzon-Forero

  1 shared

• María Clemencia Ramírez

  Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History

  1 shared

• Jefferson Jaramillo Marín

  1 shared

• Julián Mejía Villa

  1 shared

• Pierre Schill

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Associa…
• Book award of the Global Communication and Social Change Div…
• Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology book a…
• John Collier Jr. award from the Society of Visual Anthropolo…
• Recognition by the Visual Culture Section of the Latin Ameri…