CHUKEL (book)

Or order it writing to volpedaniele@gmail.com

Softcover
9 x 10 in (228 x 254 mm)
152 pages
123 photographs

bilingual (english-spanish)

Prologue by Anita Isaacs

Text by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

If Piero della Francesca, the great Renaissance painter, had been a photographer, his photographs might have been like these: incredibly radiant, intimate, strangely three-dimensional and unforgettably alive.  They bring the cruel history of contemporary Guatemala very close: the faces of the indigenous Maya in Daniele Volpe’s portraits reveal dignity, suffering, loss, strength and the profound mystery of personality.  Other photos, like those of the genocide trial, are frescos of the grotesque pageant of official impunity and evil.  I will feel haunted and stirred by these photographs for a long time. [Francisco Goldman – “The Art of Political Murder”]

With the precision of an engineer and the sensibility of a photographer committed to his time, Daniele Volpe presents us with an essential document to understand the magnitude of the Ixil people’s suffering and struggle. Just like Jean-Marie Simon showed us the agony of the conflict as it happened, Daniele now photographs its devastating effects during the postwar period: the economic setbacks, the pain of perpetual emptiness, the search for disappeared family members, the open pits, the dignified reburials. And the longing for justice, which in Guatemala remains to be fulfilled. This book seemingly emerges from the outrage of photographing Ríos Montt when he was condemned and then set free a few days through ruling as dark as almost everything related to the genocide. I welcome this photographic document which maintains memory alive with such humanity. [Rodrigo Abd – Pulitzer Prize Photographer]

Daniele Volpe’s photographs are loaded not only with the memory of the pain caused by the genocide perpetrated against Mayan peoples. This memory also includes the resistance to militarization and neocolonialism. Volpe’s eye is that of a committed photographer, with the profound empathy of someone who has lived through and shared with victims the daily struggle to recover the historical memory. [Marcia Esparza – Historical Memory Project (HMP), John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY)]

Through his extraordinary photographic collection of the postwar era in Guatemala, Daniele Volpe has portrayed, with extreme artistic talent and incredible human sensibility, a brilliant, provocative and ironically tender overview of the devastating effects of the armed conflict in the 1980s. Volpe’s photographs are a historical treasure, and his artistic talent marks every image. Furthermore, these depictions of exhumations, burials and the landscape and faces of a beaten but not conquered people, trace a crucial link between the decade of repression – disappearances, massacres and State-instigated terror – and the resistance of Mayan communities. For those who wish to understand Guatemala during the war, as well as Guatemala today, owning this volume of Daniele Volpe’s images is essential. [Jean-Marie Simon – “Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny”]