Map Of Latin American Dreams By Martin Weber

An Argentine born in Chile and now living in Brooklyn, N.Y., Weber is Silver Eye's 2008 Fellowship Recipient. Juror Ariel Shanberg, executive director of The Center for Photography at Woodstock, chose Weber's work from some 300 submissions. Weber received a cash award and this solo exhibition.
Weber photographs his sitters in Latin America, in poses that are overwhelmingly strong, even confrontational. These victims of poverty or political strife are represented not as mere sufferers, but as people we might be able to relate to. Few of us have been through a civil war or extreme poverty, but all of us have dreamed of something better.
A teen-ager sits on the roof of a ramshackle home in Medellín, Colombia. She looks out assertively at us and holds the chalkboard on which is written her dream: "That my parents smile again." Medellín has a reputation as a dangerous city; it was the headquarters of the infamous Pablo Escobar, the drug lord who organized the terrorist Medellín Cartel war against the Colombian government. Another young man from Medellín -- posed shirtless to reveal a scarred and burned body -- wrote: "My dream is to die."