Art in Action: El Salvador

The International Center of Photography in New York is hosting an exhibition of wartime photographs titled: El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers. This important exhibit details the bloody U.S. backed counterinsurgency war that ravaged the Central American nation, with the photos documenting the period from 1979 to 1983. Originally organized more than twenty years ago by photographers Susan Meiselas and Henry Mattison, the show features works by more than two dozen photographers, including John Hoagland, Eli Reed, Eugene Richards, and James Nachtwey. A number of the photos are startling in the extreme, shocking viewers with explicit depictions of the war's savage brutality. Many American artists played a pivotal role in voicing opposition to the war, including the aforementioned photographers.

[ U.S. backed Salvadoran police use a civilian as a human shield
during a gun battle with guerillas. Photo by Etienne Montes 1980. ]

In 1979 the mass movement for social change in El Salvador was thwarted by an army coup d'etat that brought a vicious military junta to power. During the decade that followed, Salvadoran government forces and right-wing death squads were responsible for the torture and murder of some 70,000 civilians - which included the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero and the killing of four U.S. churchwomen in 1980. While the Reagan administration shamefully supported this death squad democracy with direct economic and military aid throughout the 1980's, millions of Americans were in active opposition to the war.

In 1983, El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, was released as an influential book that included text by poet Carolyn Forché and a detailed history of the conflict. In 1984 the photographs were first exhibited at the ICP gallery as the bloodletting in El Salvador continued to spiral out of control. At the time, ICP founder Cornell Capa said, "The photographs of El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers are...urgent eyewitnesses to a civil war occurring practically in our backyard. They were taken by thirty photojournalists who put their lives on the line to fulfill their assignments. Some left them there. These photographs, charged with horror and emotion, are a visual plea to stop the bloodshed and inhumanity."

I initially became aware of the conflict in El Salvador in 1979 when protestors calling for the release of political prisoners occupied the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador. The government response was nothing short of fascistic. Police fired upon those gathered on the cathedral steps, slaying twenty-three and wounding seventy others. Film of the blood bath was immediately broadcast worldwide on television news, and as I watched the massacre on my television screen I knew my life was going to change. For the next decade or so, much of my artwork would focus on the war, poverty and misery that wracked not just El Salvador, but the rest of Central America as well.

[ "We're Making a Killing in Central America." 1989 flyer from an original pencil
drawing by Mark Vallen. ]

As war refugees from the region poured into my city of Los Angeles, I was in a unique position as a socially conscious artist. I listened to and learned from these victims of war, translating their desperate tales into works of art. My artworks were then used to bring further attention to the life and death struggles taking place in El Salvador and throughout the region. My paintings, drawings and prints were not only reproduced as antiwar posters and flyers - they were also used in fundraising activities for the war refugee community. It is for that reason that I feel affinity for the photographers who worked on raising public awareness about the wars in Central America. El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, is a must see exhibit of great consequence, especially in these days of endless war. The International Center of Photography is located at 1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street in NYC. The exhibit runs from September until November 27th, 2005. For more information, visit the ICP website: www.icp.org