Claudia Gordillo Castellón
In the aftermath of the Sandinista revolution's triumph in 1979, Nicaraguan photographer Claudia Gordillo Castellón began documenting her country's urban and rural landscape. She observed rapidly transforming social and political realities during the 1980s and 1990s, producing an important body of documentary work while remaining committed to aesthetic experimentation. As a correspondent for the Sandinista daily Barricada from 1982 to 1984, she was assigned to the war photographers' division and charged with documenting the controversial US-funded Contra war. Even on the frontlines, Gordillo sought to document the context around the armed conflict, focusing on the lives of civilians caught in the cross fire. This interest in capturing the minutiae of everyday life, in the midst of dramatic and difficult historical events, characterizes her entire body of work through and through; this is ultimately what sets it apart.
Whether in the barrios of Managua or the most remote regions of Nicaragua's Caribbean coast, Gordillo sought to privilege the photographic subject, observing Nicaraguan society, habits, and daily rituals from a close yet critical distance. A persistent defender of freedom of expression, she argued that a certain degree of autonomy was necessary and that, ultimately, documentary work should not be made to serve an ideological agenda.The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was one of the most photographed political movements of the late twentieth century. Photographers from around the world, including across Latin America, converged upon the small Central American nation to witness and document what was seen as an ideological conflict between post-Cuban revolutionary movements and an emerging global neoliberal regime. Gordillo documented encounters and social realities that often took place alongside the most celebrated, decisive, or so-called iconic moments of that struggle.
This is a crucial distinction that has to do with decolonizing the very notion of what constitutes a political, or revolutionary, act. Inherited notions about Latin American photography maintain that a "local" documentary tradition emerged in direct response to political circumstances, which demanded taking a position.
As Gordillo's practice demonstrates, notwithstanding the photographer's commitment to social justice, her stance was nonetheless informed by an awareness of contemporary photographic practices in conversation with Euro-American and Latin American counterparts.
Claudia Gordillo (b.1954, Managua, Nicaragua), earned a degree in Cultural Sciences from the Central American University of Managua, after studying art history, photography, and film in Rome at the European Institute of Design (1978-79), Scuola Dante Alighieri (1992-95), and Scuola Maldoror (1994-95). From 1982-1984 she worked as a war correspondent for Barricada, the official newspaper of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. After resigning from the newspaper, she worked with CIDCA (Center for Research and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast) as a freelance photographer from 1985 until 1990. For twenty years Gordillo played a critical role as an archivist at the Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America, organizing photographic collection funds, curating photography exhibitions, and editing books including two editions of Estampas del Caribe nicaragüense, Semblanza de Nicaragua en el Siglo XX, and El nemagón en Nicaragua, génesis de una pesadilla, featuring images by photographer Manuel Esquivel.
Among other honors, she was the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Photography Award in 1994, and many of the vintage black and white prints in her archive were printed as a result of that award. Her most notable photographic series include: The Cathedral of Managua, Fragments of a Revolution, Caribbean Collection, and Hidden Memory of Mestizajes. Her photographic work has been exhibited in Washington, Madrid, Galicia, Stockholm, New York, Miami, Naples, Central America, and Panama. Most recently her work was included in Temporalities Anchored by Light, an exhibition of photo-based work featuring four Nicaraguan artists curated by Susana Sánchez Carballo at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San José, Costa Rica.
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