We are happy to share with you some marvelous samples of astrophotography from Guatemala captured by the patient lens of Ivan Castro Peña. Just last week we published a time lapse video entitled Una noche en tu gracia made by mister Castro during six different nights in the locations of Alotenango, Amatitlán, Los Pocitos Pacaya, Santa Lucía Cotzumalguapa, Mazatenango and Puerto de San José. You can visit Ivan Castro’s blog to learn the technical details and background information behind this gallery at IvanCastroGuatemala.Blogspot.com

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away. —Eudora Welty

Photos by Rudy Girón

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are. —Ernst Haas

(photo by Ana Patricia Forero)

Nesting season for sea turtles brings life, challenges to the Pacific coast

One of nature’s marvels unfolds nightly this time of year on Guatemala’s Pacific coast—a beautiful yet awkward ballet of emerging life that, within minutes of existence, is challenged for survival against natural predators.

And this is the second test. The first was whether the hatchling completed its incubation at all because of human predators.

Raccoons, opossums and some birds are among species that snatch up and eat sea turtle hatchlings soon after they break out of their eggs, which were deposited in sandy nests roughly 45 days earlier by mothers lumbering ashore.

Their little flippers scooting them to sea in an age-old, instinctive march, the tiny creatures are easy prey in these first defenseless hours between sand and surf.

The much bigger problem, which threatens the very survival of the ancient species, is posed by villagers along Guatemala’s and other remote coasts: nest robbers who value huevos de oro (eggs of gold) for food and mystical purposes.

Criss-crossed by numerous lagoons and canals, the Monterrico-Hawaii Natural Reserve is home to a variety of birds and reptiles.

“The sea turtle, which for hundreds of thousands of years has inhabited the beaches of Monterrico and the southern coast of Guatemala, is in danger of extinction,” explained Thomas Stutzer, director of the Fundación Eterna Primavera (Eternal Spring Foundation). “We want to reverse the decline of the sea turtle population on Guatemala’s southern coast.”

Stutzer estimates 80 percent of sea turtle eggs are stolen from Guatemala’s beaches and sold for consumption. “We need to convince the villagers and consumers that Guatemala is losing one of its most important natural treasures,” he said.

The Eternal Spring Foundation is organizing a long-term campaign to help save the gentle creatures, which this time of year are the center of attention at the Monterrico-Hawaii Natural Reserve.

“The sea turtle is one of Monterrico’s most famous attractions, which allows foreign and local visitors alike to have a unique nature experience—once when the adult turtles come to deposit their eggs on shore and another when the hatchlings go back to the ocean,” Stutzer said.

With the turtle nesting season at its peak, October is an ideal time to visit Monterrico’s ocean-front hotels and the Monterrico-Hawaii Nature Reserve, a 28-square-kilometer paradise that serves as a significant nesting ground for endangered leatherback and ridley turtles.

Visitors have a unique opportunity to watch and even help release the hatchlings from their nest under the guidance of local environmental experts (for a modest donation).

Criss-crossed by numerous lagoons and canals, the reserve is home to a variety of birds and reptiles and serves as a rest stop for wildlife migrating through the Americas. The reserve’s dense mangrove islands provide habitat for small fish while guarding the shoreline from coastal erosion.

The reserve’s main focus is the turtle-release program, and visitors during turtle season—August through January—are sure to witness a unique moment as hatchlings emerge.

For more information: www.festivaldelatortuga.info or www.arcasguatemala.com. To book your lodging, see www.visitmonterrico.com.

The 2010 Festival de La Tortuga is scheduled for Nov. 26-28… stay tuned for details

Light begins to shine on buried treasure

Not far from La Antigua’s Central Park lies a newly refurbished Guatemalan version of Ali Baba’s cave. Walk two blocks east on 5a calle, past the original University of San Carlos and what’s now a museum. Then another half block to the ornate wooden doors and the dark red-brick exterior with a small sign that reads CIRMA.

CIRMA, or the Center for Regional Investigations of Mesoamerica, has a history dating back to 1978, when it began as an effort by two dedicated U.S. scholars to preserve Guatemala’s history. It has since become an international treasure and resource, visited by scholars and students from all over the world.

The Japanese Ambassador His Excellency Kazumi Suzuki was there in May, speaking of his country’s appreciation for the preservation of history and culture. Japan recently donated money for a new roof, structural work and a photo-processing wing, complete with new computers, cameras and scanners. Banzai, Japan!
Access to CIRMA, however, had been limited to graduate students or those academics who could provide a letter and a reasonable request to delve into the stacks–but that’s changing.

Part of the reason for the apparent mystery has been because of what’s in there. With over 7,500,000 documents and a million photographs, it’s taken a bit of time to organize things. When you have over 70,000 volumes of fragile books, dating from the late 1700s to the present, a limited staff and funds, this is not your typical used bookstore.

Grand plans for the future include a virtual museum of Guatemalan history, dating from 1808; the creation of the premier photographic museum of Latin America; the continuing international alliances with major universities; and the formation of presidential archives, to be given to the care of the government. The first collection of the illustrious President Juan José Arevalo is scheduled to be handed over to the Presidential Palace in the near future.

The staff is dedicated: Dr. John T. Way, Lucrecia Arriola de Paniagua and a few others are working to open the doors to the public and let the light shine in on the cultural treasures hidden within.

According to Mrs. Paniagua, anyone can now access the archives, historical or photographical. Come to the front desk and make an appointment. Send them email or call. The staff is helpful but limited. Hopefully, it won’t always be this way.

To make an appointment, visit www.cirma.org.gt, email lpaniauga@cirma.org.gt or call +(502)7832-1004.

Photography by Hans Namuth, conservatorship and assembly by Cristina Orive at Proyecto Cultural El Sitio, Saturday, February 20, 7pm

Hans Namuth was born in Essen, Germany in 1915. In 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, he was arrested for distributing anti-Nazi literature. To assure his safety, his father was able to obtain a tourist visa permitting his son to enter France. In 1936 Namuth traveled from Paris to Barcelona, Spain, on a work assignment with his friend, Georg Reisner, to photograph the Workers Olympics for Vu Magazine. The day before the inauguration the Spanish Civil War broke out. Namuth stayed on in Spain to document the conflict. His photographs were published in many magazines as well as the book Spanisches Tagebuch 1936 (Nishen, Berlin, 1986).

He returned to France where he joined the French Foreign Legion. After his discharge in 1940, with the assistance and financial support from friends and the Emergency Rescue Committee, Namuth made his way to the U.S., arriving in New York City in 1941.

He lived there until his untimely death in an automobile accident in 1990. He was 85 years old. During his 40-year career, Namuth photographed almost all of the artists involved in the Abstract Expressionism movement. Though he was well known in his field, his portraits and video on Jackson Pollock made them both famous.

In 1947 Hans Namuth made his first visit to Todos Santos Cuchumatán with his French-born Guatemalan wife Carmen Herrera. He returned to Todos Santos after the great earthquake of 1976 that took the lives of many Guatemalans. The changes he saw in Todos Santos persuaded him to photograph the entire population of the town. The project began in 1978 and concluded in 1987, with Namuth making several trips a year to complete this work.

“The indigenous seem to understand instinctively what I want from them; we communicate with looks and gestures. The most important thing is empathy and mutual trust. This is a formula that has never failed me.”
—Los Todos Santeros, Hans Namuth, (Nishen, London, 1989).

To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson

Club Fotográfico de Antigua

The local community of photographers will officially introduce itself to La Antigua this month with its first 
collective exhibit.

The sentiment is a common one and spills from the lips of most residents and visitors alike: walking the streets of the quintessentially colonial town of La Antigua is like walking through a living painting, an everlasting photograph. Thus, it is fitting that the community of devoted photographers who cannot resist this “photographer’s paradise” has organized itself into an official group. The Antigua Photography Club (Club Fotográfico de Antigua) meets on the first Thursday of every month to share its members’ ideas and work, offering valuable peer-to-peer support, criticism and advice to professional and amateur alike.

“The only requirement is the desire to learn or share the way you look at the world through the lens,” says club co-founder Nelo Mijangos.

The idea of the club, Mijangos adds, is “to develop and promote educational and cultural activities in Antigua.”

The fledgling club has met just a handful of times but already boasts more than 15 members. Each month photographers bring two examples of their work that fall within pre-determined themes agreed upon at the prior meeting, with one example in black and white and the other in color. Various members of the group also lead workshops each meeting to help further develop the skills and knowledge of the local community of photographers.

“We share experiences, techniques and great moments that we have learned within the world of photography,” Mijangos says.

CFA’s first exhibition is scheduled for November 6. The collective work will be displayed in Claustro del Convento de Capuchinas. The exhibition is a part of the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Consejo para la Protección de La Antigua Guatemala. The club’s collection of photos will have two objectives: to introduce the club to the local community and to collaborate with a local association in need of support through the sale of photographs.

All club members are invited to exhibit, submitting photographs dealing with themes that the members of the club have presented in prior meetings as well as the two themes agreed upon for November: metaphorical ruins in black and white and ruins in color.

The opening of the exposition will be celebrated November 6 at 7 p.m. with a musical presentation by DJ BradElectro. JP’s Rumbar will be sponsoring the event with cocktails.

Editor Note to all photographers: If you would like your photo to be included in the
7th annual REVUE Photo Issue in January 2010, please submit it to us no later than
Dec. 10, 2009, to photos@revuemag.com (more details on page 4)

The city of La Antigua Guatemala is laid out in a simple grid: seven avenues running north and south and 10 streets going east and west. In the center of town is a park (Plaza Mayor), the heart and soul of the whole area.

The atmosphere in the park is carefree and carnival-like. When visiting Antigua, I come here two or three times a day—after breakfast and at least once again in the afternoon—to relax, gather my thoughts and people watch. I feel safe here; there are policía everywhere—on scooters and on foot, in pairs, usually one man and one woman. It is pretty and green on the park grounds; flowers bloom in soft lavenders or brilliant shades of yellow and red; gardeners work daily weeding and pruning and whacking at the grass with machetes.

On each corner, a vendor with a helado (ice-cream) cart sells cones and drumsticks. A man in a straw hat sells flavored ices from his granizadas cart. More vendors on the east side of the plaza sell fruit—colorful mouth-watering slices of melon and pineapple and papaya.

Every day when school is over, many students—still in uniform (white shirts; plaid skirts for girls and navy blue slacks for boys)—come to the park to laugh and joke and celebrate the schoolday’s end with noise and play. Individuals cut through the park on a catty-cornered path to someplace else.

Families come to eat ice-cream cones or sit under the tall shade trees to spend time together—out of the house, not in front of a television—or to talk on the cell phone. I am always amazed to see indigenous women, dressed in the centuries-old traditional Mayan clothing, pull a cell phone from the folds of their huipiles (blouses) and make a call.

Tourists—in all forms from all corners of the world—form groups and laugh and chatter in their own language. Couples engage in serious conversation or serious kissing.

It is quiet in the park but not silent. Small radios and tape players send Latino beats into the air; I saw a Guatemalan-style band (an accordion, two guitars and a singer who sang slightly out-of-tune) playing for quetzales. One afternoon a band sat at the Palacio Capitanes on the south side and oom-pahed through a concert of brassy marching music.

A horse-drawn wagon clip-clops along on the cobblestone streets and offers city tours.

A fleet of taxis waits for fares on the east side of the park in front of the Cathedral.

One of the joys of being in La Antigua is to come to the park; I do not feel so alone, but actually feel like I’m part of the community for a few days—not only by the Maya women and children trying to sell me hand-made jewelry or by the shoeshine boys giving my shoes the once-over and pleading for a chance to “shoo-shine them up”—but by individuals and families who are smiling and friendly and very affectionate with their children.

We all want to be here to bask in the splendor of the fountains and the flowers and the care-free hours.

photos by Lena Johannessen

Janson enjoys a morning cup before heading out to his studio

Wildlife conservationist, photographer, author, adventurer, environmentalist and educator

The volcano Pacaya in Guatemala began erupting more dramatically than usual one day several years ago, and nature photographer Thor Janson rushed to the slopes to take pictures for his files.

“By 4 o’clock Pacaya was spewing molten lava several hundred meters into the air every 30 to 45 seconds,” Thor recalls. “The frequency and intensity continued, and by 5 o’clock the explosions reached a frightening ferocity. I was getting some great photos, but my friend was anxious to leave.

“By 6 p.m. hysterical villagers were running down the road—women praying aloud and men yelling at us to abandon the area. Pacaya was beginning to resemble a huge Roman candle. Every 10 seconds the ground shook and large quantities of lava flowed down the slope. We jumped in the jeep, threw it into reverse and backed off the road into the powder-fine ash. We were stuck, our main means of escape gone.”

Thor remembers making a futile attempt to jack the jeep out, while still snapping pictures. “As I grabbed my camera bag to run, a pickup loaded with stragglers sped toward us. Seeing our predicament, several jumped out, tied a cable to the jeep and freed us. We are lucky to be alive.”

Thor, who never has taken a course in photography, later published images of that harrowing experience in Guatemala, one of his 16 colorful picture books. Though he is best known for his photographic work, his life passion focuses on protecting the environment, he says. “I would rather be called a wildlife conservationist. Photography is only a tool I use in my conservation education efforts. Book sales provide royalties I need to support myself.”

I would rather be called a wildlife conservationist. Photography is only a tool I use in my conservation education efforts.

Born in 1953, Oliver Thor Janson grew up in suburban Chicago where his father, a Swedish immigrant, was a doctor, his mother a nurse. “I didn’t start out a troublemaker,” Thor recalls, “but after the Beatles hit the scene in the ‘60s, the world never was the same.” Like many of his generation, Thor began his lifelong struggle against the establishment.

He traveled in Europe and North Africa and tried medical school. But he had seen poverty in his travels, and his premed peers, as he puts it, “…only had eyes on making money. They felt no compassion for suffering people.”

Not yet 20, Thor dropped out in 1973, hopped on his motorcycle and headed south, attending an ‘inspiring’ conference in Mexico City on planetary ecology and the effect of human activity on climate and biodiversity. He continued to Belize, then to Guatemala and down to Lake Atitlan, where he stayed a month. “After feeling sad for a long time, I found a place that made me happy again,” he says. “It took Guatemala to get my smile back!”

Thor later crewed on a sailboat from Panama to New Zealand and eventually returned to Chicago to make some money. He headed back to Guatemala after the earthquake of 1976 to help with reconstruction efforts and decided to stay.

He connected with the University of San Carlos School of Biology and conducted a study of the manatee. “It was then—1978—I got into photography with environmental education groups and later became director of a new conservation group, Defensores de la Naturaleza.”

Thor’s hope to convince the Guatemala government to provide his group a concession to manage a forest reserve was realized in 1987. President Venicio Cerezo signed a special disposition, giving management of a section of the Sierras to Defensores, later known as the Sierra de las Minas Biosphere Reserve.

But by the end of that year, Thor left Defensores to explore and photograph remote areas of Caribbean Central America and to produce several photography books on nature. He describes his recently expanded and republished In the Land of Green Lighting as a 30-year collection of “my best photos of the Maya world.” Like the first edition, he says, the second has something of everything—wildlife, ruins, indigenous people and vistas.

The revised edition of Quetzal will be “the most beautiful book on the most spectacular bird of the Americas,” he boasts. “This is my favorite book. It has everything—natural history, Maya and Aztec mythology, cloud forest ecology, planetary ecology, and so on.” The new edition will “showcase new and innovative ways that humans can live in harmony with nature.”

Never one to stand still, Thor plans to gather material for two new books: Quetzals and Trogons of the World, which he calls “a tribute to two of the most beautiful families of birds on Earth;” and Beers of the World, “a world beer safari, a less scholarly review with photographs of picturesque watering holes from Alice Springs to Bora Bora to Munich to Timbuktu. “ It could be a very fun book.”

photos: Thor Janson

“ISTMO” Featuring unique views of Central America

With stunning aerials by internationally acclaimed photographer Ange Bourda, a new book featuring unique views of Central American sights, including volcanoes, beaches and rainforests, will debut in Guatemala in January 2009.

Titled ISTMO (Isthmus), the colorful hardcover book contains 160 remarkable photos by Bourda, a widely published French photographer who considers Guatemala his adoptive home. In his own words, the accomplishment of this book has meant “the discovery of the extraordinary and unique region, with resources never before available and presented across revealing images that impose and confirm the height and depth of a Central America that is revealed as a new world in the dawn.”

The book reflects Central America as a region, integrated geographically, culturally and economically, in which all of its countries share a united future throughout their similarities.
The objective is to show a new vision of the region, including its natural, material and spiritual richness, and to give the isthmus an international relevance never seen before. The visual creativity and rich writing form the pillars of this exquisite work.

In addition to Bourda’s photography, the book contains narrative written by Rubén Nájera, an award-winning Guatemalan writer whose work has been published in Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba and France. María Isabel Quezada designed the book; Quezada, a graduate of Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, handled design and graphical production of several coffee-table books. Evelina González de Herrera was in charge of general coordination and executive production.

The book contains five chapters:
1. At Dawn: introduces the reader to the adventure of the book.
2. The Great Perspective: presents great sights from the isthmus itself.
3. Memoirs of Fire: photographs inspired by volcanoes in the region.
4. Between Two Seas: photos of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, rivers and lakes.
5. Inhabiting the Earth: how people have developed the earth in order to subsist.

Proceeds from ISTMO benefits the Compañero en Salud, an NGO which helps bring health and medical care to people in extreme poverty in Guatemala. Since its beginning in 2004, Compañero en Salud has helped over 20,000 patients receive medical treatment. The publication was made possible in part by TACA airlines.

For more information contact Evelina González or Yazmín de Pérez at: 2366-1872 or 5460-8666 or email: yazymau@hotmail.com.