a photography tour through Latin America

Yes, there is  photography beyond the "American" MOMA made modernism that for most of the world's Art Photographers, dictates the mediums do's and dont's.  

There is even an American photography that takes a stand  and pushes the Political purpose of Photography. 

Wish I could see the show. 

Welcome to my world: a photography tour through Latin America

Revolution, torture, bulletproof shorts ... Sean O'Hagan plunges into 50 years of Latin America in a vast photography show

Sean O'Hagan

Playfully postmodern … Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, 1996 (detail). Photograph: Marcos Lopez

Given that one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century isAlberto Korda's 1960 portrait of a beret-wearing Che Guevara looking defiant, it is somehow fitting that the Cuban revolution is the starting point for an exhaustive survey of Latin American photography. Over two floors of the Fondation Cartier in Paris, curators have attempted to place photography in the context of the region's political instability, as well as track the shifting role of the photographic image in a world where the ideological certainties that underpinned Korda's portrait have fallen away. It's a tall order – and this densely packed show sometimes seems overwhelming.

1. America Latina: 1960-2013
2. Fondation Cartier,
 
3. Paris

1. Until 6 April
2. Venue website

America Latina: 1960-2013 features some big names of conceptualism and the avant garde, including Francis Alÿs, Helio Oiticica and Graciela Iturbide. But what's surprising is the number of new or overlooked artists: Anna Bella Geiger, from Brazil, uses hand-tinted postcards of indigenous tribal people to cover the eyes of a found portrait of an anonymous man, implying the exploitative relationship between tourism and the "exotic" as well as critiquing the male-dominant gaze of western art. Chilean artist Elías Adasme goes further, turning his body into a map of his country and, more provocatively, photographing himself hanging upside down outside the Salvador metro station in Santiago. His work reverberates with symbolism, not least the idea of a world turned upside down by the killing of the Chilean president Salvador Allende by the military in 1973 and the dark years of torture, killings and disappearances under the dictator Pinochet.

There is a lot of work here that used to be called agitprop: single images, series, pamphlets and posters devoted to the cause of leftwing revolution and direct-action protest. Much of it was produced under extreme conditions: state censorship in Chile and Argentina, for instance, and the risk of imprisonment or worse. Born in 1931, Juan Carlos Romero began his Violencia series in 1973, as a comment on the repression that followed the military coup in Argentina in 1966. This came to a head in the violence against student demonstrators in 1968. As an installation, it is graphic and visceral, using images of death, torture and newspaper headlines. One reads: "The tragic fate of an armed teenager."

What is striking, too, is how many artists turn their cameras on the everyday – street signs, shopfronts, municipal buildings and hoardings – in order to make work that both conceals and suggests its political thrust. Barbara Brändli maps what she calls the "nervous system" of Caracas, homing in on random words that are loaded with meaning: a passenger on a bus is snapped with her hand over her mouth above a sign saying Silencio.

This is street photography with a political twist, and you sense that it often took considerable nerve to take to the streets with a camera.Leonora Vicuña also roamed Santiago in the 1980s, making photographs that seem mundane, almost depressing, in their drab everydayness, showing a city closed down by the dictatorship. The locations were carefully chosen: working-class neighbourhoods that once teemed with bohemian life, a demimonde of poets, prostitutes, artists and transvestites that seemed to vanish as the Chilean clampdown took hold.

There are other more playfully postmodern works, too, such as Claudia Joskowicz's brilliant video homage to Ed Ruscha's seminal 1960s workEvery Building on the Sunset Strip. A slow-moving camera pans along a bustling street in El Alto, a new town in Bolivia, capturing a single ordinary day. The result is slow but mesmerising, as shoppers and flaneurs give way to demonstrators and colourful parades.

Fashion crime … Kevlar jackets designed by Miguel Caballero are designed to protect against knife and gun attacks. Photograph: Milagros de la Torre

Milagros de la Torre, meanwhile, presents prints of clothes on coathangers: a man's white shorts, a woman's tweed jacket. Lifesize and printed on white cotton paper, they are simple, stark photographs of garments made cheaply in Colombia for rich clients in Russia, South Africa and the Persian Gulf. Their stylishness, however, disguises their true purpose: these clothes are designed to incorporate Kevlar plates that protect the wearer from armed attack. Ones with silver labels will protect wearers from knife attacks; platinum denotes concealed armour to withstand a long-range assassination attempt by automatic rifle.Their designer, Miguel Caballero, is also known as the "armoured Armani". He has amassed a fortune making clothes for people who don't want to let the constant threat of a bloody death get in the way of looking good.

Susana Torres's low-key black-and-white photographs provide a breathing space amid this violent imagery. She has created portraits of products all bearing the Inca brand, including tomatoes, sweets, tinned fish, chocolate, alcohol, cigarettes and health drinks. Presented as unique artefacts and displayed as if in a museum, they become contradictory objects that speak of ethnic identity and its exploitation.

This is a show that does its best to survey all the major trends and artists in Latin American photography and image-making in the last 50 years, from the agitprop of the 60s and 70s, to Marcus Lopez's Pop Latino series, to these Inca comments on contemporary consumerism. For that very reason, it may leave you feeling exhausted; imagine a show called European Photography spanning the same period. Nevertheless, it is an enthralling experience.

• The book America Latina: 1960-2013 is published by Fondation Cartier

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/27/latin-american-photography-exhibition