INTRODUCTION TO THE MANUEL CARRILLO VIRTUAL EXHIBITION
"REVEALING PERSONAL IDENTITY: THE INDIGENOUS VISION OF
MANUEL CARRILLO"
In the mid Twentieth Century, the sociopolitical landscape of post-Revolutionary Mexico was a time of great change and effort toward establishing a unified mexican cultural identity. In this process, photographs have played a crucial role in establishing a form of visual language that has contributed to the reinforcement and formation of identity. These photographic models of representation then become critical artifacts for cultural understandings that inform interpretation.
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"Revealing Personal Identity: The Indigenous Vision of Manuel Carrillo" is about photography and identity. Melissa Carrillo, who is an artist herself, and guest curator of the exhibit, wanted to bring Carrillo’s own identity quest to life through the interpretation of his photographs as text. While developing the exhibition we concluded that a new ethnographic approach was needed in order to show how the Indigenous is constructed through photography. But it had to have the personal feeling, the "sentimiento" we very much wanted to explore and transmit. Terms such as displacement, border, location, explored in this project, come alive as a combination of images and poetry, not solely an academic discourse.
The challenge of museum exhibitions, virtual or otherwise, is to provoke new thinking, inform, and tell a story. We hope that this exhibition makes you think about Mexico as portrayed through Carrillo’s lens, about the indigenous Mexican, and about identity as a social construct.
This exhibition project is a collaboration between the Special Collections Department of the University of Texas at El Paso Library and the Smithsonian Center for Latino Initiatives.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the following Smithsonian staff for their continuous support and advise, their patience, and their unconditional good humor:
Kathryn Cornelius, Rafael Peña, Mignon Erixon-Stanford, and Farleigh Earhart.
Our special gratitude to Melissa Carrillo for her absolute commitment to this project and hard work, to Tam Muro for his thorough and insightful advise, and to Michael J. Tuttle, web master in the Smithsonian Webmasters Office.
Copyright©2003 Smithsonian Institution
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http://latino.si.edu/virtualgallery/manuelcarrillo/mclandscape.htm
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This site is a find. September was Hispanic Heritage Month and this site includes a Latino Virtual Gallery: the power of the photographic image. I do not know how to link you to the URL, but i could copy and paste the URL at the bottom of the info. about Manual Carrillo. I hope you scroll down to find this URL because the experience of the visit to indigenous people is well worth the time.
ReplyDeleteI have been spending many hours looking at the sites available to us through LOC and decided to publish this one on my blog because I loved the virtual tour of his Carrillo's work.
I wonder how many Mexican Americans have seen his work. I wonder how many Americans have seen his work. His photos bring a people alive in a way not accessible with words. I think it would be a worthwhile activity to show this virtual tour to my American Lit. classes and have them write stories about these people.
I feel as if I have touched the tip of the tip of the Library of Congress's resources and usefulness. It has opened another world for me, a world I could spend the rest of my life wandering in.
Time--how much time do I waste in my little world when a universe of possibility exists at LOC??
I could use it in my clas since most of my students are Hispanic.
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