By Pippa Oldfield,
“River of photos: popular portrait photography in Colombia” in “Once more, with feeling” Recent photography from Colombia (London 2008)

To counter the view presented by the photographers of the Ortiz Bridge, we must turn to portraits made at Colombia’s Caribbean coast. These colours photographs, made since the 1970s and still being produced today, are similarly the work of roving photographers takings picture of passer-by. The relaxed setting of beaches around the city of Barranquilla, however, and the approach used by the photographers make for very different results. In contrast to the archive of Ortiz Bridge photographs, these portraits feature many African Colombians, people who make up a large proportion of this coastal population.

Edwin Padilla, who collects these images, describes how he first came across them:

I was in Pradomar beach with Carlitos, a friend that I hadn’t seen for a couple of years, when a beach photographer came toward us with this catalogue of the work he specialised in: montage in the best tradition of a domestic Photoshop. His only tools were a 35mm camera and some plastic masks with which he covered the lens. Just out of curiosity and for a bit of fun we decided to have our picture taken.

These beaches photographers use an ingenious combination of lens masks and double exposures to create playful and surreal images in an entirely non-digital way. Padilla’s portrait, for example, showed his head in profile, inside of which a second images shows he and his friend laughing, “representing a memory”. Padilla persuaded the photographer to sell him the backlog of negative and uncollected prints that would otherwise be discarded, and has since developed a collection that numbers some 5,000 images.

These portraits contrast strongly with those of the Ortiz Bridge. The subjects appear relaxed, good-humoured and body-confident. Instead of being caught in motion, they pose for the camera, enjoying the game of creating playful photographic fictions. In contrast to the work of the Ortiz Bridge photographers, here photographers and subject are required to work in collaboration to create the necessary poses to make the double exposure work. For example: an exposure of group of people on the beach with their heads thrown backs is topped with an exposure of a group of a “giant” bottle of beer being poured out of them; two lovers kissing merge into the fronds of tropical palm leaves; an image of a woman a child fill the heart of a bare-chested young man; a Lilliputian man leaps out of a gargantuan can of Pepsi.

Padilla has began to exhibit and publish the images in this archive. Whilst he is ambivalent about how they should be viewed, they could perhaps be seen to present a very visible and positive portrait of a section of society that remains unfavourably place within Colombia’s racial hierarchy.