Salvador Memories

A photograph by Eugene Richards, currently on display at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in Manhattan, captures a subdued moment in the life of a US military "adviser" stationed abroad. The man--white, in his 30s, with an elongated mustache--is sprawled out in bed reading a book. A pistol lies on the mattress. Pinups from Playboy and Hustler cover the walls. A rifle rests upright. It could be a scene from present-day Iraq or Afghanistan, except for one detail: A hefty dictionary perched on his shelf is not in Arabic or Pashto but in Spanish. The year is 1983, and the country is El Salvador.

Richards's work is a centerpiece of "El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers," a show that brings together five dozen images produced by international correspondents stationed there between 1979 and 1983. The photographs first appeared in a book that Susan Meiselas, Harry Mattison, Fae Rubenstein and Carolyn Forché assembled in 1983, in an effort to raise public consciousness about the Salvadoran conflict, then in its bloodiest phase; an exhibition of the pictures subsequently toured the country for two years, stopping at museums, churches, libraries and universities. The collection was recently donated in its entirety to the ICP and will be on display there until November 27.

The Salvadoran civil war, which raged for a dozen years before a negotiated settlement was reached in 1992, now seems to belong to a distant past, but it was a conflict that claimed 75,000 lives in El Salvador and cost the US taxpayer more than $4 billion. The show works powerfully on the mind and the heart because it brings back a flood of memories from those years.

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