Omen by Jorge Panchoaga & León Muñoz Santini
Chasing the ghost, the traces of oblivion, and the echoes of what was and no longer is, the book Omen is a revision and reframing of the fraction of the photographic archive of the Farm Security Administration (1935-1944) hosted at the New York Public Library. That program — perhaps there is no need to add — was one of the milestones of modern documentary photography and instrumental in the constructing an hegemonic narrative — one mainly about triumph against adversity, division and catastrophe — of the recent history of the United States and their social order.
But stressing the gaze over that monumental set of images, scrutinizing at the corners of the pictures, at the backgrounds and details; in the secondary characters, in what should not be there, on what appears by chance, accident or error, it is possible to discover a different narrative: a more thick, murky, troubled, complex, contemporary and contradictory one. Like both a shatter and an apex: a premonition of the genealogical continuity of the many, tumultuous, visible and invisible, thunderous and silent, systemic violences that make up the face of the American society.
A book that at the same time serves as a mirror of the distressing reality of the United States in our days, and as a device for reflection on the way historical and documentary photography is read and understood, taking the editorial eye to its ultimate consequences.
Photographs: Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks and Jack Delano
Concept and selection: Jorge Panchoaga & León Muñoz Santini
Guest editor: Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
Texts: Paloma Celis Carbajal & Pradeep Dalal
Edition: 100. Copies 1-5 include an 6x8in photogravure.
Size: 8.5”x10.5”
Risograph printing | B&W and metallic gold inks | Gray board covers w/dust-jacket
Printed by Penumbra Foundation. October-2021, April 2022.
All proceeds go toward supporting our publishing programming and the artists.
Ships in early May, 2022.
León Muñoz Santini, Mexico City, 1976. Self-taught designer, publisher and photographer, has developed his career mainly in the area of editorial design and especially in the fields of literature, children's literature, social design and photography, working for various institutions in Mexico and abroad. For his work has won several awards, among them the New Horizons Bologna Ragazzi Awards (2009 and 2013); the AIGA’s 50 Books / 50 Covers (2009). Santini is the author of the books Horizontales y verticales (2012) and Satán (2017). He has developed projects, given talks and conferences at academic, artistic and publishing institutions such as the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, the Otis College of Art and Design, the University of Illinois College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts ( CADA), the California College of the Arts, the Jan Van Eyck Academie, the Frans Masereel Centrum, the Vincent Price Art Museum, Ithaca College, and Printed Matter Inc. In 2013 founded the independent and anti authoritarian publishing project Gato Negro Ediciones. Pushing the boundaries of what the book format and the editorial language can deliver. In 2018, the Fowler Museum at the University of California at Los Angeles organized an extensive retrospective exhibition of the project, South of No North: Gato Negro Ediciones. In 2019, Santini was invited by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) to inaugurate the Featured Publisher section, an exhibition and sales space open between October 2019 and March 2020. In 2017, Santini became a member of the Alliance of Graphique Internationale (AGI).
Jorge Panchoaga's metaphorical images develop an interest in the way memory combines in its narrative an indistinguishable correlation between reality and imagination, configuring an important part of the way we make sense of reality and the ecosystems we inhabit. Panchoaga was born in Popayán, Colombia (1984). He studied anthropology and made his first photographic project La casa Grande based on his family history and the way in which the territory is essential to configure identity and give meaning to the resistance that is exercised in daily life in the indigenous peoples of Cauca, where his family comes from. Later, he broadened his interest in spaces where memory has been fractured by violent events, emphasizing how people have built an intimate relationship with aquatic ecosystems in Dulce and Salada. In recent years, Jorge has focused efforts on generating pedagogical processes on image in Afro-descendant communities through oral memory and imagination, as they have investigated the processes of resistance and emancipation in Kalabongó. Panchoaga has obtained scholarships from SMArt Sustainable Mountain, Switzerland: Ministry of Culture of Colombia. He has received different distinctions in various categories from Poy Latam in the years 2017 (1) and 2019 (4); winner of the Emerging Talent Award from Lens Culture 2016; l NEXOFOTO Ibero-American Photography Award, Spain; the IX National Colombo Swiss Photography Award from the Ministry of Culture. His cinematographic work has been awarded at Bogoshorts 2021 in the category for best cinematography and best experimental short. His work includes clients such as the New York Times, El País from Spain, Süddeutsche Zeitun from Germany. Currently, he is an explorer for the National Geographic Society and develops themes related to memory in high mountain areas; he in turn independently develops a long-term project on drug policies implemented in Latin America through the reconstruction of silenced memories and local and popular culture that has resisted, transformed or adapted to illegal economies.
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