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Top: Stereograph showing Christopher Columbus "discovering" Latin America. Bottom: stereographscope. Both images from At the Margin.
2-3-4-D:
Digital Revisions in Time and Space, 1991-1992
All of the works reproduced here are part of a 1991-92 series called 2-3-4-D:
Digital Revisions in Time and Space, in which I use digital technology
to challenge and complicate historical stereotypes. Specifically they
are responses to the ubiquitous image of Christopher Columbus (as New
World “discoverer”) which I encountered in stereographs of
Latin America during a 1991 residency at the California Museum of Photography,
University of California, Riverside.
The three-panel sequence A Thousand Centuries deliberately
confronts the viewer with different imaging/viewing technologies (a stereoscope
containing a turn-of-the century stereograph and a viewmaster containing
a slide from the 1980s) as well as different cultural perspectives: the
hyperbolic homage to Columbus inscribed on his Havana tombstone vs. the
variety and insouciance of Havana street life.
The four-panel sequence At the Margin progressively
subverts a 1939 vintage stereograph of the Columbus monument in the city
of Trujillo, Dominican Republic, by moving the figures who are literally
and symbolically marginalized (the black woman at the edge of the frame
and the Indian woman at the base of the statue) to the center.
The diptych Native Fruits juxtaposes a historical
engraving of the “conquistadores” landing at LaCruz (Cuba)
with a panorama of contemporary figures digitally assembled from the streets
of Havana, Cuba, where I photographed them in the 1980s.
The diptych Friends and Deliverers, while based
on an image of U.S. soldiers in Cuba at the time of the Spanish-American
war, reflects an ongoing pattern of U.S. invasion of Third World countries,
rationalized as democratic salvation from demonic Old World or Communist
forces. The uniformed Young Pioneers from contemporary Cuba are intended
to celebrate the militant pride and racial fraternity of this revolutionary
social order, while at the same time questioning its potential for rigidity.
—Excerpt from Artist
Statement
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