One of the longest-running tales passed around among visitors to the mountains of the Chiapas Highlands – virtually everyone who gets there seems to have heard it - is the one about how the Mayans from the communities around San Cristóbal de Las Casas are afraid of cameras because they think they ‘steal their souls’.
For an added thrill, it’s often added that someone was once killed at San Juan Chamula, largest of the Highland villages, for nothing more than taking an innocent snap.
Chiapas Photography Project – Maruch Sántiz Gómez
This powerful folk myth is retold by many tourist shamans, in guidebooks.
It is true that most Highland Maya dislike and object to the standard travellers’ practice of constant, uninvited picture-taking (some, like the women who sell in the markets in San Cristóbal, have just had to get used to it).
In Chamula this amounts to an overt ban on taking photos in many parts of the village, enforced by ‘constables’ with big sticks who, if they catch you trying to take a picture off-limits - and above all in the church - will grab the camera, tear out the film, and return it to you probably broken and with a deal of abuse (nowadays, they know how to deal with digitals too).
However, there is no record that they’ve ever killed anybody – if they did, the victim was a very solitary traveller, as he or she has never been recorded missing.
This and the idea of ‘stealing souls’, though, all add to the idea of the Maya as being weird, primitive and unfathomable, and help outsiders feel comfortably superior.
They fit in with a conventional image of indigenous peoples, which itself has so often been set by first-world photographers in search of the exotic, pointing their cameras at subjects who seem to stare back blankly, apparently comprehending nothing and with no original responses of their own.
They’re also a gross distortion of what the Highland Maya actually think.
One of the prime reasons for their resentment of picture-snapping is very practical: they are acutely aware that their faces appear on all sorts of books and postcards, for which they receive no reward whatsoever.
They dislike being used as decorative objects and getting nothing in return, and so impersonal picture-taking is seen as just exploitative.
On a deeper level, suspicion of photography is related not to any crude idea of cameras ‘stealing souls’ but to the much more complex Mayan concept of chu’lel (‘vital energy’ or ‘life force’).
This is possessed by living creatures and inanimate objects alike, and any contact between people, with animals, or between people and the earth, involves an exchange of chu’lel.
Casual picture-taking is rejected because it takes away chu’lel without asking - like walking into someone’s house without knocking - and because the Highland Maya dislike all impersonal interactions.
And, the Maya can use photography themselves.
A spectacular demonstration of this are the Chiapas Photography Project (CPP), started in 1992, and the Archivo Fotográfico Indígena (AFI).
These remarkable projects provide more than 200 photographers from the Mayan communities around San Cristóbal, most of them women, with cameras and technical support to enable them to take pictures of their own world for themselves, with their own eyes.
It was founded by Carlota Duarte, an American nun, with the aid of a range of volunteers, but nowadays the Mayan photographers are increasingly self-sustaining.
The results are extraordinary, from images of village life to much more idiosyncratic projects, and have been publicized in exhibitions and an impressive series of books.
Mayan women can often seem to be among the world’s most timid, tradition-ringed people, but rather than staying within set traditions the AFI photographers have each developed very personal styles, and readily experiment.
Camaristas, a group collection by all the AFI’s photographers published in 1998, presents a very intimate, direct vision of modern Mayan life.
Maruch Santís Gómez has published Creencias (‘Beliefs’), a series of subtle black-and-white images illustrating traditional Chamulan proverbs that has been so successful her work has been shown in galleries in Mexico City and outside Mexico.
Xunká López Díaz has produced My Little Sister Cristina, a Chamula Girl, capturing family life with enormous charm and imagination.
And one of the most beautiful recent publications is Nuestro Chile (‘Our Chili’) by Juana López López, wonderfully vibrant, near-abstract images of habaneros, poblanos and other chilis set against traditional textiles and mats.
Juana López has also been working on a very different project, a great series of pictures in which the overall image is intricately composed of many small pictures of different aspects of the subject, in a style similar to one used by David Hockney in the 1980s.
The thought occurs that she must have somehow seen Hockney’s work, and been influenced by it. The answer is no, she came up with the idea herself.
Though still operating with very tight resources - virtually all its members still have to combine their photography with selling in markets, tending the family plot or whatever else they do to get by - the project has given these photographers an entirely new, individual expression and presence, a powerful example of ‘giving voice to the voiceless’.
The Archivo Fotógrafico Indígena is the most prominent part of the Chiapas Photography Project, which now also includes Lok’tamayach – Fotógrafos Mayas de Chiapas, an association set up by the AFI’s photographers to extend their work to other parts of Chiapas.
An effort is now being made to back up the CPP with a permanent endowment, to ensure all its activities have a permanent future.
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Nick Rider is the author of the Cadogan Guide to Yucatán and Mayan Mexico
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The AFI is based at a study centre beside the Chamula road out of San Cristóbal:
CIESAS
Carretera a Chamula Km 3.5
La Quinta San Martín
San Cristóbal de Las Casas
CP 29247
Chiapas
The publications can can be ordered through the website, or can be found in bookshops in San Cristóbal.
While there’s no permanent exhibition, the AFI is also open to visitors (Mon–Fri, 8–2), but always call ahead – (967) 678 5670.
See also: An inside lens on Maya life – NYT / IHT
