Visual Action: “They took them alive, We want them alive”

“Just like every year, more and more photobooks were published in 2014. The importance and awareness of making a photobook is increasing each year. ‘Making a photobook’ is the new fashion with much more available exposure. For the second year, we at Emaho invited photobook bloggers, publishers, authors, book-designers, all with ‘Photobook Fetish’ to present their ‘Most Interesting Photobooks of 2014’.” – Manik Katyal, Founder, Emaho Magazine

Mexico – Visual Action works for human rights using visual action as its main tool. They produce and incentivize the production and circulation of images and performative actions to support human rights around the world. Based on the power of images, and its contemporary circulation, they will produce powerful visual campaigns confronting human rights violations around the world, and in pursuit of truth and justice. The basis of this organization is the collaboration, interaction and development of visual projects in partnership with Human Rights organizations, art networks, photography agencies and cooperatives, indigenous organizations, coordinating activists, photographers and artists to generate unique visual actions that may have influence in the development of social and political issues.

Visual Action will give a voice to the creators of images that want to communicate their work in favor of social engagement, and in the pursuit of justice in cases of human rights violations.
They state: “Based on the Latin American experience of struggle for Human Rights after the dictatorships we suffered in the seventies and early eighties, Visual Action will draw on our experience and enhance it with the growing power of images and means of distribution available today. Visual Action will also focus its mission on the visual education of the next generations to empower their skills in the use of photography and in image creation for social change.“

Picture credit @ Nirvair Singh Rai

Tlachinollan, Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña, Visual Action/Acción Visual and Human Rights organizations in Latin America call for an international visual action in solidarity with the victims of kidnapping and murder that happened last September in Iguala, Estado de Guerrero, Mexico. The visual campaign seeks photographers and groups of students who will pose for a picture with a sign reading in order to express worldwide sympathy and support for the missing students and their parents in their struggle to pursue justice and truth for this brutal and unimaginable act of violence against unarmed young students. The sign reading will send a message for truth and justice to prevail in Mexico. The production of the sign should be made by the students so this becomes an educational experience in the production of images for a social and solidarity purpose.

The students and social organizations of Mexico will receive these images and distribute them around the country, in the social networks and in contact with the Mexican Human Rights Organizations such as Tlachinollan, that represents the families of the victims and other Photography and Human Rights organizations in Mexico. For them, this support is essential to strengthen their fight for justice and the respect for Human Rights, a struggle that will gain for them the support of sensible people around the world.

mx 43 zocalo Gerardo Sirolli

The brutality against a group of 43 rural students of the Teachers Rural School Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa conducted by the Mexican state of Guerrero and its police in collusion with drug lords of that state , mark an elevated level of violence and horror exerted on Mexican people. This requires an immediate action in Mexico and around the world so that the truth is known and Mexicans can move ahead in the implementation of real justice in this case. World wide support as manifested in this campaign will give moral, public, and powerful support to the seekers of justice and truth in this case.