Colombia\'s Traveling Storyteller

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Few people in Corona, a Queens neighborhood teeming with Colombians, would suspect that the old man with the fedora walking steadily down 82nd Avenue had recently been bestowed the Cruz de Boyacá, one of their homeland's highest honors.

Yet at 92, Nereo López is arguably one of the most accomplished Colombian photographers of his - or any - generation, always on the move as he chronicled the famous and the obscure, the powerful and the dispossessed.

As one who came of age during photojournalism's golden age, Mr. López followed the lead of magazines like Look and Life, but he forsook their American perspective for his own. By the middle of the last century, he was documenting his own country with the same dedication and talent as any of his American or European counterparts. His images show heroism in the daily struggles of his countrymen. It is a sincere, unvarnished yet empathetic look that helped Colombia understand itself.

“My job was to make stories about human beings,” he said. “And most of them were poor.”

But he was quick to add that he portrayed “poverty, not misery” in his travels across the country. He jok es that he moved around so much that he probably spent a total of two years in his car during that peripatetic time. It was reflected in his work.

Nereo López Nereo López, 1958.

“Nereo López was, above all, a traveling photographer dedicated to story telling as well as a cartographer sometimes, practically of that hybrid genre that combined visual poetry with documentary photo essays,” wrote Santiago Rueda Fajardo, a curator, in an essay accompanying the book “Nereo López: Un Contador de Historias,” a retrospective of his work. “Among other things, his work accomplished the important task of helping to ‘open the eyes' of Urban Colombia to valleys and Andean ranges, the Caribbean coasts that were linked by few flights or boats, and a weak railroad system. It was a country that did not know the lives of other people who inhabited the same national territory. Nereo was one of the first to get access to many places and people that had never before been photographed.”

As Mr. López's stature grew, he gained exclusive access during Pope Paul VI's 1968 visit to Colombia and to Gabriel García Márquez when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Mr. Rueda Fajardo said Mr. López was among the first Colombian photographers to be seen as a “photographer-artist,” attaining international fame and publishing books.

At the time, Hernán Diaz was the only other photographer in his league, Mr. Rueda Fajardo wrote. But unlike Mr. Diaz - a studio shooter more akin to Richard Avedon - Mr. López was an itinerant, independent journalist who produced photo essays alongside writ ers for an international readership.

His penchant for finding the heroic in the everyday came naturally if painfully. He lost both parents when he was 11 and was raised by different relatives.

“I didn't have time to think about what I wanted to be because I had to survive,” he said.

But like many of his generation, his path to photography was serendipitous. As a teenager, he started working as a porter at a movie house in Baranquilla. Over the course of 10 years he worked his way through the ranks, from porter to projectionist and later manager. In his spare time he sold photos to friends. But even inside the theater he was thinking like a photographer as he took in the Mexican and American films.

“I saw two movies every day,” he said. “I studied the photography of the movies.”

 Inspired by the cinema he was immersed in, he imagined he would some day become a cinematographer. But when he got his first break to work as a newspape r photographer, that soon changed.

Nereo López Corralejas in Sucre, 1962.

The inspiration was always there. “My projects are reflections of what I saw in the cinema,” he said.

In 1952, he started working for the country's second largest newspaper, El Espectador. Since they had no darkroom, he printed his images in his kitchen at night, using plates and bowls for his chemicals. In1957 he became chief photographer for Cromos, a photographic magazine in the vein of Life or Look.

One of his earliest essays, an epic piece on the Magdalena River, clearly set his signature tone and style. He would also be a correspondent for the Brazilian magazine O Cruzeiro.

After decades shooting and traveling, in 1987 he put everything he had into Ensenanza y Cultura Fotografica, a center dedicated to photography, which had a gallery, darkrooms and a library. But because of what he called poor management, he was forced to close the center and donated 1,200 books to the national library.

He was broke, without a pension and 80 years old.

“If I was living in Colombia at the time I would be dead,” he said. “In Colombia, I had no horizon. Now I have a new horizon.”

That is because a friend in New York who knew about his crisis offered him a ticket to New York City. So, true to the spirit of a traveling photographer, Mr. López moved to New York City on an artist's visa in 2000 and became a United States citizen about five years later.

Until recently, he rented two small rooms in a home in Richmond Hill, Queens.  One was his office - packed floor to ceiling with his archived negatives, books, tear sheets and computer equipment. In the other, he slept on an old wooden bed frame propped on plastic buckets. He recently moved into a more spacious one-bedroom apartment in a building for the elderly in Harlem.

Mr. López has lived simply since moving here, though it is not as if he has languished in obscurity. He has lectured at Harvard, been recognized by the New York City Council and has had work shown at the Queens Museum and El Museo del Barrio.

His square-frame Rolleiflex has given way to a Canon G-9. He searches his archives the way most photographers do - by memory. Always productive, he is still pursuing new ideas.

Mr. Lopez recently returned from a trip to Spain and France during which he was teaching and shooting. He plans to call his latest project, on aging, “The Golden Age.”

“Today, I am a little tired, and I don't have the energy to work the way I did,” he said.

Tired, but still active.

“The day I am not an active person,” he said, “I will die.”

Nereo López Silvania, 1958.

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