Nine Pocket Books about Latin American Photographers

(with PHotoBolsillo y La Fábrica) Includes cataloging and database.

This series of volumes was published in collaboration with The PHotoBolsillo, La Fábrica and Archivo de Fotografía Urbana (Venezuela), Brizzolis Arte en Gráficas, Museoteca and CFE. As a series of monographs in a didactic and affordable format, it widens its scope by looking at Latin American photography, starting with Venezuelan authors. 

The Authors in whom this collection focused were: Barbara Brandli (1932-2011), Alexander Apóstol (1969-), Tito Caula(1926-1978), Vasco Szinetar (1948-), Alfredo Cortina(1903-1988), Soledad Lopez (1938-2016), Hellmuth Straka (1922-1987), Paolo Gasparini (1934), and Ricardo Jimenez (1951-2025). 

They were part of Venezuela’s art scene, making portraits of significant figures, in both the cities, and countryside, portraying the people and the country’s landscapes. They not only worked in photojournalism, but contributed to the history of photography in Venezuela. 

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Barbara Brandli (1932-2011) committed the essence of her creative calling to studying and raising awareness about Venezuela’s distant hinterlands, far from the country’s largest cities, ancestral ways of life and customs were still being preserved. 

Alexander Apóstol (1969-) confronts us with the difficulties entailed in thinking about our identities as something decipherable, tangible and static; at the same time, it reveals that these identity traces are usually presented to us in slippery layers. His work questions and tirelessly multiplies the social and collective image of a country at a dramatic juncture: Venezuela today.  

Tito Caula (1926-1978) His archive of more than thirty thousand images focusing on Venezuelan society and belonging to Archivo Fotografia Urbana somehow reveals itself as the flipside to a vast photography practice, held together by a constant documentary strand: urban records, landscapes, characters, prototypes and events that set him apart from the modus operandi of photographers sheltered in the distinguished studio of "signature photography”

Vasco Szinetar (1948-) Images and literature: two passions that orbit through the author’s work and life, along with politics and death. His oeuvre is made up of series whose dimension is based on the accumulation of moments. He plays the parts of collector and hunter, both of which are common in the world of photography. 

Alfredo Cortina (1903-1988), his moving obsession for his lifelong companion, the great poet Elisabeth Schön, with whom he faced the unclassifiable commotion of the world, we can only conclude that he reinvented photography, founding it on its most modern precepts. Something suggests he was beyond his modernity, that his trade was neither apocalyptic nor sublime, that he didn’t seek to destroy photography with the photographs, or render it banal - like Man Ray or Marcel Duchamp did. Neither did he want, like every single one of our late modern masters, to find “the” image, that unique and definite photograph. No: Alfredo Cortina simply built another archive, nothing more, nothing less, in the style of August Sander but with the difference that while the latter’s dramatic collections include all the inhabitants of a single world, Cortina is the incessant archive of a single person before many worlds.

Soledad Lopez (1938-2016) eros and death, eternity and decay prowl about Soledad Lopez’s images. Some bear the stamp of documentary photography, but always from an existential angle. That may explain her penchant for photos of street urchins, funerary statues and abandoned places. There is always an underlying question, an enigmatic drive that goes beyond the specific solution

Hellmuth Straka (1922-1987) born in Czechoslovakia in 1922. Hellmuth Straka arrived in Caracas in 1952, fleeing from a Europe in ruins. After working as a nurse, interpreter, police officer, and even circus trainer, his culture and talent for languages gave him work and enabled him to devote his life to photographing different ethnic groups living in Venezuela at that time, in addition to defending their rights. After moving to Maracaibo, he began to study and take portraits of tribes like Wayuu women, Quechua, and Jivaroans. This yielded a series of extraordinarily beautiful travel albums – his true photography legacy– many of which are shown in this book, almost life-sized. Filled with photographs, drawings, and handwritten notes, the albums comprise a miscellany that captures the concerns and aesthetic of this unique artist, who was endowed with the uncommon sensitivity and the ability to capture his particular version of a land in these luminous collages. 

Paolo Gasparini (1934-) in his photos, Paolo Gasparini knows how to reveal and highlight meanings in urban signs. In the centers and outskirts OF Latin American cities, he found a diversity of images that could not be tailed in catalogued, primarily because of the complexity and richness of their combinations. 

Ricardo Jiménez (1951-2025) An active sightseer who has learned to get lost in the city so he can later find it again, and on the way find himself, Ricardo Jimenez is a careful yet discreet observer. He never dares attention to himself but manages to find poetic images in the manner of a water diviner who makes his discovery, with a modest expression, short on words and little but a hand-held tool which he only implements when there is no other choice.