Reinventions: Postdictatorship dominican photography

In essence, the act of reinventing consists in conceiving something one more time, imagining it once more, developing an idea or an object once again. Reinventions: Post-Dictatorship Dominican Photography implies a brand new representation of “the Dominican essence” through an artistic medium that had been underdeveloped until the mid-20th Century. This exhibition shows us the kind of photographs usually produced in the Dominican Republic after three long decades of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship (1930-1961). These new images gradually replaced the old photographic productions, mainly composed by the exaltation of the prevailing régime and full of romantic issues with an idealized vision of reality. With this show we bring up the following hypothesis: the Dominican Republic had the right conditions for the birth of an artistic photographic production during the historical period following the dictatorship. The resulting production was an expression tool for an entire generation, and since that period it has defined and influenced the development of the genre among Dominican photographs and artists alike. Besides the exploration of the origins of contemporary Dominican photography, this show raises its contributions to the research of possible forms for a new national imaginary. The selection we can see at IVAM shows us, for the first time using photographs only, some of the main references for the society and the space that were being built in the Dominican Republic from the Sixties on. That’s why Reinventions becomes a show against the prevailing notions concerning “the Dominican essence”, not only in the Dominican Republic, but on a wider, international basis. There are four main parts defining this proposal: Repressions, Reinventions, Landscapes and Essays. The first one, in contrast with the other three, includes a series of investigations concerning photography during the dictatorship (Santiago Chaguito Morel and Max Pou). The remaining parts define an evaluation of different genres and main motives by Wifredo García and the new artists (Julio González, Pedro José Borrell, Víctor Cuqui Cabrera, Pedro Nicasio, Domingo Batista and José Antonio Ramírez). As a result, the whole exhibition stresses the exploration of different approaches to the human body, the phenotypes and the ethnic idiosyncrasies; to the landscape, habitat, historical and anthropological discourses; and, finally, to the dialectics between the individual vision of the creators and the reality offered by their photographs.