El Salvador: Repression & Revolution is a photographic exhibition researched and prepared by Camerawork and the El Salvador Solidarity Campaign.
Eighteen photographers have donated their work to the exhibition. The result is a massive presentation of nearly 100 colour, black and white and photomontaged images, together with testimonies, letters and interviews with Salvadoreans.
In the first panel John Pilger explains their purpose: 'The photographs in this exhibition tell a simple truth about a Central American country, no bigger than Wales, which deserves the attention of all Europeans not yet lost to the conditioning of an economic cartel. The country is El Salvador and the truth is this: a people who in recent years have begun to break free from the prison of feudalism, to aspire to live decently and to see their children live without malnutrition and disease, are being murdered systematically, by their 'government'; and the murderers are being re-armed and sustained by the United States with more than a little help from Britain.'
The story is told by arranging the photographs and text into panels, and grouping these panels into 11 areas: socio-economic background; history; lives of women; repression; the Junta; FDR; unity of the people; Farabundi Marti National Liberation Front; children; the media; American intervention; the church. In each area the photographs are supplemented by short pieces of text, mostly statements from Salvadoreans.
Some sections are rich in photographs some sections rely more on text. This, together with the division of the exhibition into 11 areas, indicates something important: it is an exhibition that tries, sometimes almost painfully, to be honest. It doesn't opt for easy solutions such as a 'focus' on one particular area. There is no special emphasis given, for example, to images of atrocity, although there might have been since the organisers were offered many of these. (Of course there are some because atrocities are part of daily reality in El Salvador.)
The organisers have tried to give the photographs a context that provides a real account of the struggle in El Salvador. They are conscious that the media has been involved in a massive campaign of disinformation regarding El Salvador, which includes both outright lies and the more subtle business of making the truth look false. In one of the Media panels Jon Snow from ITN says: 'Mass opinion in the US is influenced very heavily by the television networks, ABC, NBC and CBS. When, finally, the networks had to get involved in reporting El Salvador, they chose to send their State Department correspondents who had been reporting verbatim the statements made by Alexander Haig and others formulating US policy on El Salvador. ABC for instance sent their man who had been in the State Department for 20 years. He arrived on the tarmac in a chartered plane and did what we call a 'piece to camera' and got back into the plane with the film.' Tim Buckley in the New Yorker June 1981 says, also in this section: 'One lesson has been learned from the Vietnam war at any rate, and that is to make it as difficult as possible for the journalists to see what's going on.'
This exhibition tells us what is going on with a confidence and directness that comes from an understanding of the reality of El Salvador: you must either line up with the repression, with a regime that has murdered and mutilated more than 25,000 of its citizens in the last two years or you must follow the mass of the population on the revolutionary path. There is no middle ground in El Salvador.
Militants should try to hire this exhibition to show in their area — its educative and politicising value is considerable.
The exhibition is a Camerawork touring exhibition and is available for hire. For details phone 01-980 6256.