The Eyes Have It
Hector Emanuel’s The Americanxs photo documentary makes a statement about changing communities in the United States, drawn from 25 years of artistic-cum-journalistic explorations of the Americas
By Ricardo Sandoval-Palos
Ask Hector Emanuel to describe his life as a journalist, and he’ll quickly say he’s not good with words. He prefers to show you. He prefers images over spoken or written words for his storytelling. His images are his words.
“While both can be artistic and intellectual, photography has the advantage of sometimes having a visceral reaction without having to overanalyze or overthink issues,” Emanuel said.
For 25 years, the Peruvian-born journalist’s black-and-white photography has combined journalism and art. And now his latest work has elicited praise for its portrayal of a changing United States. A landmark moment, so far, has been his coverage of the aftermath of the horrific shooting last fall in El Paso. (Images from this project are displayed throughout this issue of palabra.)
“The images from the? El Paso shooting still move me emotionally every time I see them, and I can’t imagine that will change,” he said.
Over the next three years, Emanuel plans to train his focus on his adopted country, after a career of documenting how people cope with political, environmental and ethno-racial issues throughout Latin America. Along the way, his work has won accolades, including a World Press Photo prize and a National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism award for coverage of civil conflict in Colombia. He won a Pictures of the Year International award for depicting life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and festivals in Lake Titicaca communities in the Peruvian Andes.
Emanuel says The Americanxs was inspired by Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank’s 1960 series, The Americans, and how it challenged prevailing myths about American society and national identity.
What does it mean to be an American? The search for answers to that perennial question remains relevant 60 years after Frank’s work, especially now that Latinos account for at least 18 percent of the U.S. population. “Yet we still rate as foreigners and outsiders,” Emanuel said.
“This is a simple story of modern-day America, through the Latinx experience,” Emanuel said. “I knew the Latinx community was younger than the general U.S. population, but I’m still surprised everywhere I go of just how young and vibrant and politically committed it is.”
Emanuel hopes his documentary project ends up as a book that can be used as a tool for teaching future storytellers – from middle school students through beginning journalists -- and emerging political scientists.
“I hope to create a teaching tool in which young Latinx can learn different ways to tell their own stories and express their ideas about what the United States means to their lives,” he said.
AMERICANXS
By Hector Emanuel
Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank’s The Americans challenged prevailing myths about American society and national identity. Sixty years since its publication, the question of what it means to be American is not only still relevant, but it underlies much contemporary discourse on everything from electoral politics to media to pop culture and public policy. Of course, changing demographics, and especially the growth of the Latinx population (now estimated to comprise18% of the US population, according to the US Census Bureau) have brought increased attention to discussions of national identity. Nonetheless, despite their long history in the US, Latinxs are largely represented as ‘perpetual foreigners’ who are always outside the ‘real’ America.
In the spirit of Frank’s work, Americanxs engages viewers in questioning dominant representations both of America and of Latinxs by visually exploring issues of race, language, religion, politics and everyday life. Rather than trying to show the whole of Latinx life in the US (an impossible undertaking), Americanxs seeks both to tell American stories from a Latinx perspective and to show how Latinx stories are American stories.