The photographer with reason to fear bright light

OneWorld UK

By Rachel Crews
One of the themes of the work of photographer Carlos Reyes-Manzo is the difficulties faced by women around the world. And the difficulties dont get much grimmer than in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and Guatemala City, where hundreds of women have been kidnapped, raped and murdered.

It is a symptom of the low priority officialdom gives to the lives of these women that many of their deaths have gone unrecorded. Often they are never even reported, because they are illegal immigrants.

Many bodies are unclaimed, because the families do not know where the women were living, let alone that they have been killed.

One stark black and white image in the current exhibition at Oxo Tower Wharf on Londons South Bank depicts crosses marking the spot where the bodies of eight women were found in Ciudad Juarez.

Another shows a mother wearing a placard round her neck bearing the image of her daughter under a single word: Justicia.

Reyes-Manzo has an affinity with victims, for he was one, too: a journalist and member of the Chilean Socialist Partys national council during the Allende government, he was arrested after Pinochets coup, tortured and held in a succession of prisons and concentration camps before he escaped and was given asylum in Britain. Standing under a bright light still makes him shake from the recollection of his interrogation.

So when he talked about his life and photographs at Amnesty Internationals Human Rights Action Centre in London recently, he first asked for the light to be dimmed.

His own experiences colour the way he takes photographs: I talk to them honestly, he says of the people he photographs. I never pose as a photographer. Im a human being with them.

This approach enables him to document people in extreme circumstances, such as the woman gravely ill with AIDS in Kampala, who allowed him to photograph her at home in 2001.

It has also allowed him to give a voice and a face - to people not normally heard or seen in the media. Pointing to the image of a young Palestinian girl in the desolate Shatilla Refugee Camp in Beirut, he says, We dont hear about them very often, but theyre there.

His experiences have given him an insight into the contrasting lives of those living in the West and those living outside it. Working in Iraq in 2002, just before the American and British invasion, he documented the suffering inflicted by economic sanctions to make people human enough for people in the West to understand.

His work also highlights atrocities within Europe and Britain itself, from the death of an Irish traveller in a racist attack in Liverpool to the death of Jean Charles de Menzes, the innocent Brazilian killed by police after the London bombings, whose memorial Reyes-Manzo photographed outside Stockwell tube station.

Aware of the limitations of his work, Reyes-Manzo says he never promises anything to his subjects, aware that many will not find their lives changed by his work.

However, in the long term, he believes social documentary can bring about positive change, and at the very least can force people in the West to question why people around the world continue to suffer, and why we are still not doing enough to help them.

* Carlos Reyes-Manzos Exhibition, Impunity, runs until 5 March and is open daily from 11am to 6pm. Admission is free.

* Rachel Crews is studying journalism at the London College of Communication and is a OneWorld TV volunteer