Colombia, A New Vision (Segunda Edición)

This book, a new edition of Colombia inédita, the classic photo-essay published by Villegas Editores in 1992, includes nearly one hundred new photos of places that did not appear in the original edition, as well as a good part of those found in that first work, all of them a tribute to the striking talent of the Colombian photographer Santiago Harker.

These photos were taken in the 1980's and early 1990's, when the presence of subversive armed groups in Colombia was limited to remote wilderness areas and it was still possible to freely travel through the country and record the marvelous diversity of its landscapes, the wealth of its lands and the idiosyncrasies of its inhabitants.

Harker was thus able to capture the parallel dimensions of the hallucinatory reality of a rural Colombia that still exists but is rapidly disappearing. Due to the horrors of the current war and the spread of globalization everything is changing and the country he shows will soon be a thing of the past. These pictures have an incalculable documentary value nowadays: they represent the visual memory of a Colombia that is being rapidly transformed by the pressures of the modem world, a society that no longer has an identity or a past will have no future.

In the beautiful photos of Harker nothing is alien but all is new. They reveal the hidden wonders of everyday reality, in a style that is original and full of a very Colombian sense of humor. Many of them allow for multiple interpretations, like a puzzle box in which there is always something hidden beneath what one sees.