Challenging an Old Narrative in Latin American Photojournalism

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When the photographers Pablo Corral Vega and Loup Langton held the first Pictures of the Year Latin America contest in 2011, they had no idea how many submissions they would receive. About 17,000 images arrived, shot by 600 photographers from Mexico to Argentina, and they declared it a success.

When they held the second contest this year, 30,000 images came in.

“We really were worried about getting all the judging finished in one week,” said Mr. Langton, who announced the winners on Sunday. “Or killing the judges in trying to do it.”

This enthusiasm reveals much about the rapidly changing world of photojournalism in Latin America. When Mr. Corral and Mr. Langton met 20 years ago, a photojournalist in Quito, Ecuador, often didn’t even know other photojournalists in neighboring cities. Photographers in Latin American countries worked mostly alone, often learning about their own countries from European and United States-born photographers whose images graced the covers of glossy international magazines.

For years, they had been taking the magical shots â€" building on the work of artist-documentarians like Martín Chambí and Graciela Iturbide â€" but rarely connecting with one another or finding avenues to push their images onto the international stage.

Then came the Internet. Camera prices fell. Economies in places like Brazil and Argentina improved. Budgets in big-name newsrooms shrank, and editors began clamoring for local talent instead of sending staffers abroad.

As a result, Latin American photographers are pushing against an old narrative, directed mostly by outsiders, that paints the region as a mere hybrid of violence and feathers.

“We are decolonizing ourselves, in a sense,” Mr. Corral said. “We’re finding that we need to tell our own stories.”

Today, Latin American photographers are more connected than ever. Their work is splashed across the front pages of major international publications. The Mexican photographer Javier Manzano recently became the first freelancer to win a Pulitzer Prize in 17 years.

This year’s Pictures of the Year Latin America winners tackle the world’s most visible conflicts (the portfolio of Tomás Munita, the contest’s photographer of the year and a New York Times contributor, is filled with images from Syria), as well as quiet, quirky, even comical moments from the offices of bureaucrats and the sidelines of political campaigns.

Tomás Munita An owl at dusk in Chile’s Nirres Forest in the area of ​​Los Nadis, along the Baker River. June 2011.

Winners also slipped themselves into the more complex narratives that live in the cracks between the region’s clichés. A new category, “The Middle Class,” challenged storytellers to turn their lenses toward a broadly defined but growing economic group. Entrants documented a wealthy Mexican family guarded constantly by private security officers, the wedding industry in Paraguay and Argentines who live in gated communities fit for multipage spreads in Architectural Digest.

“In Argentina, living in a ‘country’ (gated community) gives you the power to control almost all of your environment,” the story’s text explains. “Every danger imaginable for a privileged social class is left outside this almost perfect microcosm.”

The creators of that essay are seven photographers in Sub, an Argentine cooperative. Members not only pool resources and ideas but also document stories together, labeling all images as a collective, not as individuals.

“We’re seeing a lot of stories being produced by groups of people,” Mr. Corral said. “Gathering a people around a concept or cause is a lot more powerful than just telling your own story. It’s not about the photographer; it’s about the story.”

Sub formed in 2001, when an economic crisis wracked Argentina, pushing people from all sectors of society to band together and demand change. The overriding sentiment was do it yourself, without foreign intervention, and do it together.

“For us, the idea to form a photography collective had less to do with Magnum and more to do with the social and political context in which we met,” members wrote in a group missive.

Mr. Corral said one major development had yet to arrive in Latin America. For years, many editors at local and national publications throughout the region have considered photographers to be mere illustrators of written stories, ignoring the vibrant photojournalism scene in their midst. Today, newspapers are still filled with grip-and-grin shots of talking heads or gory frames of car crashes.

“It’s not like we don’t know how to take the photos,” Mr. Corral said. “The problem is we still don’t have an outlet for the work.”

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