Published by LENNY LETTER
Lenny Letter è la newsletter settimanale ideata da Lena Dunham e Jennifer Konner per dare voce alle giovani voci femminili, autrici, giornaliste, personalità dello spettacolo o esistenze ordinarie, che scrivono di politica, vita quotidiana, letteratura contemporanea, cultura pop, musica. Fondata nel 2015, è ormai un cult e seguitissima in tutto il mondo.
DI LAURA TILLMAN
In questo articolo, Laura Tillman intervista la foto-reporter Adriana Zehbrauskas. SI parla del suo lavoro sugli studenti scomparsi in Messico e, soprattutto, delle dinamiche della fotografia quando un obiettivo testimonia e descrive un’assenza.
Like millions across Mexico, photojournalist Adriana Zehbrauskas was horrified when, in September 2014, she heard the news that 43 college students had been disappeared en masse from the rural state of Guerrero. Though originally from Brazil, Zehbrauskas had been documenting Mexico for a dozen years, and she quickly began thinking of ways to tell a visual story of absence. The students number among the 27,000 throughout the country who have vanished since 2008, their cases often left uninvestigated, their families left to mourn with no answers and no grave site to visit. Zehbrauskas traveled to Guerrero nine days after the students disappeared.
As Zehbrauskas began to work in the poor, rural section of Southwest Mexico where the students had been taken, she realized there was a double loss when someone disappeared. Not only were they missing, but because the families rarely had photographs of their loved ones, they had little to remember them by. Often cell-phone images had been lost — because households rarely had the ability to back up or download their photos, a missing or broken phone signified the erasure of that record forever. Zehbrauskas knew she couldn’t retrieve those moments — but she could document the present. She set to work taking family photos.
The project that emerged, Family Matters, is a collection of composed portraits of residents in Huehuetónoc, Guerrero. Reading the images, knowing that any of the subjects could one day be missing, the portraits are as unsettling to behold as they are beautiful. Families pose, often before the town church, in this small, mostly indigenous community near the border of Oaxaca State, wearing their Sunday best. Zehbrauskas provided prints to each family that are now displayed in homes throughout Huehuetónoc, along with showings in Mexico City and New York.