Gabriela Zamorano: South and East: Fragments Rural Images from the South of Mexico and Palestine

Now, frozen in paper, they became memories. Like memory, they take shape in fragments. South and East. South Rural Mexico and Palestine. Although at a distance they seem alike. Or perhaps the sights that remained in these images, like memories, allow us to trace a bridge. Daily life. A smile. An important thing to have with you while you pose for a picture. A family meal. A frozen piece of a song. An interrupted game at the Palestinian sea - one that is both beach and border. Crowded refugee camps and abandoned corn fields emptied by poverty and migration. South and East. Life goes on, it still happens there. These are just images in an attempt to invoke as fragmented memories, the dignity of lives that have become disposable within the absurd games of economic wars.
--Gabriela Zamorano

Gabriela Zamorano was born and raised in Mexico City. She studied social communication as well as journalism, video and ethnographic photography. In 1993, she began communications projects at a prison, then later in indigenous communities in Chiapas.

After University, she moved to Oaxaca where she worked for a civil organization (Transparencia S.C.) on a research project about the impact of government policies on the indigenous population. In 1998, she was invited by the women's commission of a regional organization (Union de Comunidades Indigenas de la Zona Norte del Istmo) to create a communication center. During a period of two years she worked to develop a series of workshops with local indigenous women.

It was in that time that she worked on photographic essays that include: rural campesino daily life in Oaxaca and Chiapas, traditional parties and musicians, and labor in garbage dumps around urban areas. In 1998, Gabriela also went to Palestine and photographed families, which for her reflected similar circumstances to what she saw in Mexico.

Currently Ms. Zamorano is a candidate for Ph.D. in Anthropology at the City University of NY. Her academic interests focus on the construction of political identities in the South of Mexico.

"My academic and professional interests are deeply inspired and rooted in my photographic practice, which to me represents a personal and intimate connection to the people that I work with and that makes me believe that the world can become a different place."