Photo exhibit is both art and history

The title is both an exaggeration and understatement, but the show is a strong dose of reality. This morning I took an early tour of the latest photographic offerings on North Front Street.

Jacqueline Woods, Reporting
As part of the Image Factory?s tenth anniversary, the art foundation is holding a photographic exhibition titled, ?Latta Pichaz?.

Gilvano Swasey, Curator, Image Factory
?It?s more than just an art exhibit. It?s a historical exhibit. It?s very hard. We could do an exhibit every month for the rest of our lives to showcase what we have found of Belize. But its one little peak into the history of Belize through photography.?

The pictures capture life between 1895 and 2005 taken by over thirty-five different photographers.

Gilvano Swasey
?Half of them we don?t really know who they are. We have had them through the Craig Family collection, the Erry King collection, personal collection and the Belize Archive Department. Not everybody was established with names like Avery and Evans, who I think worked for the Government at the time, so they had their own studios and other family studios established. But there were many other photographers out there whose images were collected but they were not documented.?

Image Factory Curator Gilvano Swasey says some of the shots taken are on par with today?s contemporary images. In this case it is the mix of the new and old that makes for the latest in a string of well received shows.

Gilvano Swasey
?A regular exhibit like a painting exhibit or sculpting a more art would take us at least three to four months getting in touch with the artist, getting them prepared, getting the things together because we take about two weeks before the show cataloguing it. A show like this takes even more time and we kind of crammed it up into a regular show like three months.?

?We had to go and dig up a lot of info to find out where the images came from of course to give proper credits. We try to identify the different images, give them a time period. Most importantly every time there is new images being found so you have to go through a selecting process not being bias but try pick things that at the end of the day complement each other complement each other.?

The eighty pictures on display were chosen from a selection of five hundred photographs.

Lot a Pichaz officially opened tonight at seven at the Image Factory on North Front Street.