La Muerte de Todos los Días, by Guillermo Arias, in Casa Escorza, Guadalajara
With the thundering eloquence of arms, the footprints of violence come up, more and more frequently, throughout the country. The situation, even more evident in the northern frontier of Mexico, was the subject of the photo report La Muerte de Todos los Días” (Death in Everyday life), that helped the Mexican reporter Guillermo Arias Camarena win the Premio Nacional de Periodismo Cultural Fernando Benítez (Fernando Benitez National Cultural Journalism Award) last year, and that will be presented in an exposition at the Casa Escorza de la Universidad de Guadalajara from November 18th.
“The sirens, the ambulances, the operatives, the crime scenes, and the dead bodies are part of everyday life in the northern frontier of Mexico”, declares Guillermo Arias Camarena (Oaxaca, 1975) while describing the series of twelve photographs that a jury made up by Cecilia Jarero Ramírez, Alfonso Morales Carrillo and Enrique Villaseñor García awarded for the forcefulness of the message, the efficiency of the photographic and journalistic language, and the subtlety of the visual elements used, as well as the importance and the “complexity that covering this type of report involves”.
Guillermo Arias Camarena has worked as a photo journalist since 1993 in diverse medium in the country, such as the newspaper Siglo 21 and journals of the Grupo Reforma. Since 2001 he has worked as a photographer for the international agency Associated Press. He stated that the project La muerte de todos los días, “emerged some time after he began to cover the Mexican drug war, specifically when he found himself living the story: storms of high caliber rifles broke the night silence and took from my apartment the sense of security in spite of the three doors and four locks. That’s how easy it is to be in the middle of it. And it’s a lot easier to get used to it”.
In a text prepared for the exposition, the wirter and journalist Antonio Ortuño describes “The garden of delights” in La muerte de todos los días: “a Little kid smiles with a a gun in his hands. A body thrown away like a fruit peel in the middle of nothing. The hands of another body, covered badly by a modest and insufficient sheet. The silhouette of a soldier, glaring like an apparition. A man, with his neck un-naturally turned to the right, hangs from a bridge […] I have known Guillermo Arias for years: he is one of the most extraordinary photo journalists of the country. What I don’t know anymore is this country: this scenery of blood and guts that Arias reflects with the expertise of a war correspondent. The ideal portraitist in years that, once they are over, if they ever are, we will remember as years of unceasing death”.
The exposition La Muerte de Todos los Días, coordinated by the Feria Internacional del Libro (International Book Fair) of Guadalajara and the Secretaría de Vinculación y Difusión Cultural del Centro de Arte, Arquitectura y Diseño de la UdeG (Secretariat of Cultural Networking and Diffusion of the Art, Architecture and Design Center of the UdeG), will inaugurate on November 18th at 8:30 at the Casa Escorza, in calle Escorza 83, a few feet from the avenida Juárez. Entrance is free and, as part of the inauguration, there will be music and an honorary toast.
