Rivers in photographs of the Colombian Armed Conflict. Environment, body, and violence

Abstract

This article reflects on four documentary photographs produced along two of Colombia’s major rivers in the context of the armed conflict. These images by Manuel Saldarriaga Quintero and Jesús Abad Colorado depict horrific scenes linked to political violence. The dialogue between these photographs evokes, among other things, the strategies of armed groups—guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the National Army—: selective and mass killings, clashes, the disappearance of bodies, control of strategic territories, and the imposition of social orders through terror. In theoretical and methodological terms, this analysis views the photographs as social artifacts that construct memories of the recent past through aesthetic and political operations. The article proposes a reading of their visual constructions and their links to the production of meaning around the memories of the armed conflict in the country’s rivers.