VERY RARE and collectable book from an important and respected Latin American photojournalist.
Almost impossible to locate a copy.
This book is a beautiful and heartfelt documentation of the plight of coffee workers in Chiapas and Guatemala.
The tri-fold back cover has a COMPLETE ENGLISH TRANSLATION of the text and captions as well.
Very Good condition indeed, please see photos for condition. Includes several bookmarks laid in from Arte Popular Autentico Mexicano.
Marco Antonio Cruz was an important Latin American photographer, who unfortunately died on April 2, 2023, in Mexico City, due to a heart attack while riding his bicycle on Taxqueña Avenue.
According to Del Castillo Troncoso, the work of Marco Antonio Cruz "represents one of the highest and most complex graphic parameters of contemporary Latin American photography."
Marco Antonio Cruz was born in Puebla, in 1957. He moved to Mexico City in the 1970s with 50 pesos in his bag. He began his artistic training as a painter. Later he continued his career as a photographer with Hector Garcia Coco, who upon learning of his work invited him to work with him.
Cruz was a press photographer. However, when he opened his photographic agency "Imagen Latina" in the 1980s, he was able to take a break and create photographic works with a personal stamp, getting away from the adrenaline and speed of photojournalism a little. It was at this time that he was able to produce high-quality photoessays, which covered social issues, and which critically portrayed the world, both the coffee farms and the way in which the indigenous people were exploited in southern Mexico and Guatemala.
In his visual record " La Hija de los Apaches ", Cruz portrayed the daily life of visitors to this pulquería in Mexico City. Another photoessay, on which he worked for 15 years and published in the book Dwelling in Darkness , shows and reflects on the way that people with visual disabilities live.
Although Cruz photographed in 12 of Mexico’s states, he was most affected by his experience in the southern state of Chiapas, where he discovered many cases of trachoma, especially among the Aboriginal peoples living in extreme poverty in the highlands with little or no access to medical care and inadequate sanitation facilities. Cruz explains that people who become blind in this part of his country are “condemned to live confined inside their houses, and nothing is known of them, or their existence … until death.”