In 1982, Efraín Ríos Montt seized power in a coup and plunged Guatemala into one of the bloodiest episodes of its civil war (1960-1996). In 2013, Guatemala’s highest court sentenced him to 80 years for genocide and crimes against humanity. As a photographer and human rights activist, Daniel Hernández-Salazar has sought to bring attention to some of the most violent phases of Guatemala’s history. Hernández-Salazar initially trained to be an architect, but soon abandoned his studies to focus on his passion for photography. He worked as a photojournalist for international agencies such as Agence France-Presse, Reuters, and the Associated Press, eventually leaving to work on projects that revealed the depth and breadth of the country’s social and political abyss. His work The Traveler (2013) features one of his most well-known and recurring motifs, the angel, a figure whose wings are digitally manipulated images of the exhumed shoulder blades of an unidentified victim of the war. During Montt’s trial, the artist plastered the image on the back of public buses in Guatemala City alongside the words si hubo genocidio (there was a genocide), a seemingly simple, powerful gesture in the face of influential historical revisionists who fired the entire staff of the archive that documented the regime’s war crimes, and helped to bring Montt to court in the first place. A bishop, who used the images on the cover of a report documenting the atrocities, was assassinated, and the man who posed as Hernández-Salazar’s angel has since found a new home in Los Angeles. This act of public affirmation stands against a broader pattern of genocide denialism, seen not only in Guatemala but also in countries like Turkey, Rwanda, and Bosnia, where state and societal forces continue to erase or distort historical atrocities.

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION: The Traveler (2013), photograph on wallpaper, 440 × 660 cm. Courtesy of the artist