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BIO

I am a Colombian and American photographer. My work bridges the fields of artistic and documentary photography using a range of alternative photographic processes and digital photography.  Over time my focus has shifted from a personal exploration of my experiences as an immigrant in United States to global concerns of cultural diversity and human rights in my native country. Since 2011, I have been documenting indigenous people in South and North America who are fighting to protect the natural resources and are affected by mega-projects imposed on their territories that are changing the climate of the Earth.

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My current work is on the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, the largest tropical rainforest in the world, nowadays at risk of becoming a savanna and a carbon dioxide emitter.The deforestation is affecting the lives of the indigenous communities, like the Mura people, who inhabit it and is changing the climate of the planet. The policies of the  former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, emboldened loggers, farmers, cattle ranchers, and miners to strip and burn unprotected indigenous land in the Amazon. In 2022,I extended my investigation to the Nukak Indigenous people, the oldest tribe living in the Colombian Amazon Rainforest, who have been restoring the Rainforest.These two communities area ancestral indigenous communities who have been fighting deforestation from colonial times to present.

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ESX/COCA, my previous work, is an ethno-educational photographic project that seeks to deconstruct colonial and postcolonial visual narrative of the coca plant through a series of portraits taken at the Wasak Kweswesx School in the Nasa indigenous reservation of Toribio, Cauca, Colombia. There, children are educated in the Yuwe language and in the rites of the coca plant. ESX, which means COCA in Yuwe, aims to educate the public on the sacred nature of the coca leaf and its uses through the experience of the school.

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I photographed the Nasa people with a large format film camera and printed the images with the antique Platinum-Palladium process.  This approach achieves an aesthetic result that successfully links the faces of the present to the past.  As a group, the photographs pay tribute to the long history of struggles by the indigenous in the Andes to defend the millennia sacred coca plant and other aspects of their cultural heritage. 

 

Since 2011, I have also been documenting the crisis of forced displacement and confinement suffered by the Embera and Wounaan indigenous people due to the Colombian armed conflict and by mega-projects. My investigation of the Embera displacement grew to the point that I created a project entitled: Akadoi Ebera-Hope of the Embera. Today, my main focus of study is centered on the methylmercury contamination on the Embera indigenous by the Urra Hydroelectric Dam and the negative effects the dam has been causing them after 20 years.

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In America, I photographed between 2016-17 the situation of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation and their fight as Water Protectors to defend the Missouri river from contamination due to the Dakota Access pipeline. The Dakota-Lakota were at the forefront of an environmental, political and human rights movement. Helped by indigenous and eco-activists from around the world, they battled the last segment of the Energy Partners Transfer (ETP) pipeline next to the reservation of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, in North Dakota,under NODAPL. To the date, there has been four spills.

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For an earlier self-published book, Diaries of Death (2010), I photographically re-enacted the death of the victims of the massacres committed by paramilitary groups, basing the images on testimony collected by Human Rights Watch in Colombia. These images are printed with the lith photographic process, to convey the sinister quality of the events depicted.

 

Stone Faces (2008) It is a project I started on 2008 and I have continued to present with refugees who immigrated to America escaping religious

repression, gender violence, racism involving gubernamental policies like ICE, apartheid, antisemitism, fascism, and war. They symbolize current issues in Ukraine, Iran, Palestine, Korea, South Africa, Colombia, America, and in the past, the horrors of the Holocaust in the World War II committed by the Nazis.These portraits are printed on stones and sustained by rusted steel bases which symbolize the passage of time. Just as the Mayan

civilization carved images of important people onto stone shafts, Iconsider these photographic sculptures to be stelae. For this project, I photographed these people using a 4x5 view camera and then printed their images on onyxes and scabos slabs using

liquid photographic emulsion.

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For two other self-published books, I created imagery accompanied by original poems that tell personal stories of love and death and to be transformed; the lovers forget death in an attempt to make the instant an eternity. The beauty of the platinum-palladium process enhances the painterly, dreamlike quality of the images. In Dreams and Nightmares (2007), using myself as subject, I explore the labyrinth of femininity. 

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My work has been exhibited and lectured in  razil, United Kingdom, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and America. I graduated from Indiana State University with an MFA on Photography and an MA on Hispanic Literature. A BA on Communications and Journalism from Universidad Externado of Colombia. I have taught photography and alternative photographic processes in Colombia and America and written and photographed articles for El Espectador,The Guardian, Aljazeera Tribune-Star and SEMANA SOSTENIBLE.
 

Contact me at :  alexandra.mcnicholstorroledo@gmail.com

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All content by 2021@Alexandra McNichols-Torroledo

 

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