The exhibition Ever Astudillo dibujos, Fernell Franco fotografías y Oscar Muñoz dibujos [Ever Astudillo Drawings, Fernell Franco Photographs, and Oscar Muñoz Drawings] opened on September 21, 1979 at the La Tertulia Modern Art Museum in Cali. This was the first time that these three artists had shown their work together, and for the first time the public was interested in seeing a range of different perspectives of the city of Cali: nighttime, the street, and the interiors of tenement houses. This catalogue also includes essays by the art critic Eduardo Serrano (Zapatoca-Santander, b. 1939) on the artist Ever Astudillo (Cali, b. 1948), and by the historian Álvaro Medina (Barranquilla-Atlántico, b. 1942) on the artist Oscar Muñoz (Popayán-Cauca, b. 1951).
The Colombian photographer Fernell Franco (1942, Versalles, Valle del Cauca–2006, Cali) showed three series in this group show: Prostitutas [Prostitutes], Bicicletas [Bicycles], and Interiores [Interiors]. Prostitutas was first shown in Ciudad Solar in 1971 [see: “Sobre la prostitución” [On Prostitution], doc. no. 864547]. Franco was one of the best-known photographers in Colombia in the 1970s; he worked as a photojournalist at the Occidente and El País newspapers in Cali, and as an advertising photographer for the famous advertising agency Nicholls Publicidad.In the 1970s, Muñoz and Franco took an interest in tenement houses—old homes that belonged to large landowners and prosperous businessmen in Cali in the early twentieth century. When armed partisan confrontations between conservatives and liberals drove many people off the land and into the city, the owners of those old homes converted them to tenement housing, starting the cycle of the deterioration and overcrowding that Franco captured with his camera. Franco’s photographs and the drawings by Astudillo and Muñoz are representative of life in Colombia because they document Cali’s urban decay, underclasses, and mysterious shadows.