Building a History of Citizen Photography: the TAFOS Story

Abstract

From 1986–98, over the years of Peru’s bloody internal conflict, Talleres de Fotografia Social (TAFOS) armed over 270 Peruvians from 30 communities – campesinos, miners, Afro-Peruvians, youth, men and women in the barrios – with cameras. Defining itself as being born out of the people’s need ‘to recover their own image’, TAFOS photographers documented daily life, working conditions, political upheaval and grassroots mobilization during a turbulent period of Peruvian history. TAFOS created a visual memory gathered by the very people that lived it that has become part of the visual social make-up of Peru society. The TAFOS photographers were doing citizens journalism before the term was coined. Sketching a potential history, this article tells the story of TAFOS. It re-presences it as a forbearer to contemporary developments in citizen and participatory photography and argues its significance as a counter archive of photographic history. The TAFOS experience pushes contemporary visual practitioners to examine the criteria by which they devise and articulate socially engaged projects. Its narrative challenges the tendency to mythologize photography’s capacity to empower and enable social change by insisting that people and politics, not just photography, lay at its core.

Keywords:

• Participatory photography
• community photography
• history of photography
• socially engaged photography
• citizen journalism

Dr. Tiffany Fairey is a Research Associate in the Department of War Studies, Kings College, London. She is co-founder and former director (1999-2010) of PhotoVoice. Her work has been recognised with various awards including the Royal Photographic Society’s Hood Medal for outstanding advance in photography for public service (2010). www.tiffanyfairey.co.uk

Notes

1 TAFOS is often featured in Latin American photography anthologies such as Mario Testino’s (ed.) Lima Peru 2007, Damiani; Billeter, Erika, 2007, Canto La Realidad: Fotografia Latinoamericana 1860–1993, Planeta and Alejandro Castellote (ed.) 2007, Mapas Abiertos: Fotografia Latinoamericana, 1991-2002, Lunwerg Editores.

2 Statistics taken from Llosa (2006, 34).

3 The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission established to investigate abuses committed during this bloody period of conflict put the death toll at 69,280. Their report revealed that the Shining Path were responsible for 46% of the deaths, with the government security forces killing roughly a third. It was the indigenous communities that disproportionally suffered. A revealing statistic was that 75% of the victims who were killed or disappeared spoke Quechua as their native language, despite the fact that the 1993 census found that only 20% of the population spoke Quechua or other indigenous languages as their native language (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación 2004).

4 “Vaso de Leche” or “Glass of Milk” was a feeding program aimed at reducing malnourishment.

5 Over the years these included Deutscher Entwicklungsdienst (DED), Brucke der Bruderhilfe Switzerland, Evangelisches Missionswerk Germany, Schweizer Missionsgesellschaft Bethlehem Switzerland, Fastenopfer der Schweizer Katholiken Switzerland, Lutheran World Relief de Estados Unidos, Oxfam and Christian Aid.

6 Available in TAFOS (2006) and Fairey (2015a).

7 Mirrors with Memory held at San Marcos University in Lima, a hub of Sendero activity.

8 Taken from an unauthored internal TAFOS document believed to be written by Thomas Müller around 1992.

9 The archive contains more than just the TAFOS images and negatives. As well as contact sheets, work and exhibition prints, the archive holds records of promotional materials from TAFOS’s exhibitions and events, the publications and media in which TAFOS has been featured and internal organizational documents: plans, evaluations and detailed research work carried out by Eleana Llosa and her team in 1995–1996, which included extensive interviews with a number of the TAFOS photographers.

10 http://facultad.pucp.edu.pe/comunicaciones/tafos/.

11 http://www.cultura.gob.pe/es/tags/yuyanapaq.

12 See Fairey (2015a) for a fuller account of the TAFOS archive and how the images have been used and circulated from 2003 to 2011.

13 A research film, These Photos Were My Life, consisting of interviews with former TAFOS photographers, is available at http://tiffanyfairey.co.uk/#/these-photos-were-my-life/.

14 For example, see the recent street-art exhibition “La Calle es el cielo” (The Street is the Sky), which saw TAFOS images back on the streets of Lima and being used in conjunction with educational activities and street tours.