In 1987, critic Patricia Londoño wrote the first contemporary review of the subject of photography in Colombia. The article presents in chronological order and describes the publications, exhibitions, and photographic archives used, salvaged, and disseminated by photographs produced from 1978 to 1987. In Londoño’s view, the increased documentary and historical use of photography in the eighties is significant. A number of public institutions—among them the Museo de Arte Moderno of Bogotá, the Banco de la República, and the Biblioteca Pública Piloto of Medellín—began to take an interest in gathering, preserving, classifying, and disseminating photographic material in the framework of projects to construct and restore visual memory. Nationwide cultural initiatives along these lines became the model for regional and local projects carried out in a number of cities and towns. This article discusses the social and historical meaning of publications, exhibitions, and photographic archives that were publicized as a crystalline record of national and regional culture, that is, one not filtered by any sort of criticism, documentary analysis, or historical or aesthetic scrutiny.   

The article “El patrimonio fotográfico en Colombia: estado de la cuestión” is based on a lecture given by Patricia Londoño at the Encuentro Colombiano de Fotografía held in Rionegro in 1987. The text was published in the magazine Estudios Sociales put out by the Fundación Antioqueña para los Estudios Sociales (FAES) in order to communicate the results of research in photography. At that time, Londoño was a participant in the Memoria Visual project of the Banco de la República that attempted to salvage the Colombian photographic tradition. Memoria Visual attests to the value and importance given to photography in Colombia in the last twenty-five years. In the archives described by Londoño, the photographs are promulgated as exact representations of the past world.  

Local historians, as well as those from other parts of Colombia, had a particular approach to collecting, classifying, and exhibiting photographs, one based on specific ways of building the “history of photography.” Those historians selected images according to a series of categories most of which reproduced the literal content of the photographic images. Their approach did not entail a rigorous exploration of technical or aesthetic variables. The basis for these photographic projects was explained in a text including albeit very superficial information on the photographers, the state of photography locally, and the history of the city or town. Without exception, every photograph was classified as visual and historic heritage.  

Throughout Latin America, the role of photographic archives and the construction and publication of “local histories of the photograph” as testimony have grown in importance for decades. In Peru, for instance, the experience of TAFOS, or the social photography workshop, is a point of reference across the continent for projects that attempt to link photography and society. In Mexico, the question of photographic archives has become a topic of national interest. In Brazil, the topic of photography has been studied at university social science and art departments for years. This shared interest in photography has led to reflection on the problem of the relationship between visual documents and reality, a reflection that questions the testimonial function of photography as the core of a cultural model with nationalist aims.