Henry Agudelo on forty years photographing Colombia

All pictures © Henry Agudelo

Content material Warning: This text accommodates imagery that readers might discover upsetting

The veteran photojournalist has captured the wonders and horrors of Medellín for over 40 years. Right here he displays on documenting the battle that continues to hang-out town

At round 10pm on an autumn night in 1996, Henry Agudelo left the places of work of Bogotá-based newspaper El Tiempo. Turning the nook, a way of concern gripped him. Two vehicles rolled up beside the pavement at midnight, and he was bundled, fingers certain, into the boot of a car.

Over the course of a number of hours, the automobile and his kidnappers stopped at quite a few ATMs. Every time they withdrew cash from his bank card, he prayed he could be let off the torturous merry-go-round. Finally, he was dumped at a bus cease. Per week later, he found that the hazard of being a photojournalist in Nineties Colombia was not simply as a result of menace of the nation’s warring political teams – his kidnapping ordeal had been the work of a territorial colleague, bitter that Agudelo was incomes extra on assignments.

The 63-year-old photographer speaks with out sentimentality, however his tales of the previous have an audible weight. Considered one of Colombia’s pre-eminent photojournalists, he has captured each the wonders and horrors of humanity. Agudelo is named ‘El ojo de dios’ (The attention of God), a label that grew to become the title of his 2021 biography, written by native journalist Róbinson Úsuga Henao. It’s a testomony to the depth and breadth of his archive, a lot of which stays unpublished as a consequence of years of journalistic censorship.

Agudelo was born in 1959 in Medellín’s infamous Comuna 13, a sprawling hillside neighbourhood that was as soon as thought of one of the vital harmful locations on the earth. All through the Eighties and 90s, it was run by drug traffickers as a transit route out and in of town. Within the early 80s, an opportunity alternative as a darkroom technician at El Mundo – the primary of the nationwide newspapers he would work for – led him to images. , he requested to shadow senior reporter Pedro Nel Ospina at soccer matches and commenced pursuing images himself. At the moment, the information was dominated by Pablo Escobar and the drug commerce that was engulfing town in violence. As a self-titled “peasant boy,” Agudelo’s competitiveness inside an elitist trade more and more pushed him to seek out these unimaginable pictures.

Agudelo’s early images doc the horror of Escobar’s unhinged mood, opposed factions of rightwing paramilitaries (funded by rich landowners and companies), radical leftist guerilla teams, and the chaos of presidency. The violence killed hundreds of harmless individuals, to not point out the ‘disappeared,’ all through the Nineteen Seventies to Nineties. His archive contains images of younger navy personnel filling in to placate the 1985 assault on the Supreme Court docket of Colombia, wherein members of the leftist M-19 guerrilla group, employed by Escobar, took over the Palace of Justice in Bogotá. One other sequence paperwork the horror of the Mapiripán bloodbath of 1997. Agudelo arrived as charred our bodies nonetheless smouldered. Paramilitaries had terrorised the village and executed ‘presumed’ guerillas, youngsters amongst them.

The faces of violence

Photographing these scenes formed Agudelo’s visible language. “I felt a horrible anxiousness to realize a single {photograph} that would reveal the dimensions of the drama that had taken place,” he says. “I wished a picture so highly effective it competed with the textual content [in the newspaper].” His earlier images usually honed in on the human faces of tragedy, an intense focus on ache and struggling. The camera gave him a licence to be there. “I appeared on the scene with out being the protagonist of it,” he says. Capturing on an analogue 35mm, he was compelled to assume extra; to be treasured together with his movie.

Agudelo nonetheless follows the legacy of the battle in the present day. From his son’s bed room he can see Comuna 13, the place he grew up. The neighbourhood was a guerilla stronghold till 2002’s Operation Orion – a navy offensive that eliminated leftwing rebels. Just some miles away is a superb scar within the hills that marks La Escombrera. The landfill is regarded as a mass grave for over 300 individuals who vanished through the navy assault. Agudelo’s work is worried with filling in these silences and looking for justice, utilizing his northern star ‘hacer seen lo invisible’ (to make the invisible seen) as a information.

In a single {photograph}, a small boy friends from behind {a photograph} of his lacking father, a policeman presumed killed by Colombia’s largest insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 1993. The portrait captures the kid’s religion within the picture, all pictures, to stop collective reminiscence being extinguished. The household had joined a social motion, La Asociación Caminos de Esperanza Madres de La Candelaria, which holds a vigil each Wednesday at a church for victims of the battle. Agudelo retains in shut contact together with his topics, whose lives he feels an excellent affinity in the direction of.

“I see increasingly more of a rustic immersed and enclosed in a couple of who need to exploit us socially, economically, politically. I see the younger individuals of Colombia with no future”

Just a few years in the past he heard information that the as soon as little boy had misplaced himself throughout the folds of a prison gang, by no means realizing the destiny of his long-lost mother or father. When one thing is simply too overwhelming to recollect, as people our tendency could be to attempt to overlook. “In Medellín, we prefer to overlook, and even should overlook,” he says, “as a result of it’s a matter of survival.” {A photograph}, for Agudelo, is a battle in opposition to oblivion.

His sequence Indelible Marks (2017) is an instance of this mission to memorialise. Working with a morgue, Agudelo images parts of pores and skin of unknown deceased. He information their distinguished options – comparable to tattoos and scars; marks that announce the person regardless of the anonymity of dying – in order that their stays may in the future be named. With a bittersweet happiness, Agudelo recounts how one {photograph} helped the household of a vanished transgender intercourse employee to determine their stays years later. Harrowing however compelling, the sequence continues for example the painstaking journey of collective therapeutic.

The battle in Colombia is ongoing. It nonetheless stirs in Afro-Colombian area Chocó, the place cocaine manufacturing is quickly rising, and in southern states close to Bogotá. In January 2023, the federal government’s human rights ombudsman revealed that 215 activists and social leaders have been killed throughout the nation in 2022 – the very best toll ever recorded.

“I see increasingly more of a rustic immersed and enclosed in a couple of who need to exploit us socially, economically, politically,” Agudelo says, sadly. “I see the younger individuals of our nation with no future.” Based on Agudelo, many Colombian photojournalists haven’t stored their archives, appalled by the reminiscences they maintain. However Agudelo has chosen to carry on to his. “My legacy to younger individuals in the present day is that they determine themselves with what was performed previously,” he says, “and know there’s nonetheless a strategy to remedy all this.”