March 31 - May 19 , 2007
Opening: Saturday, March 31, 5-8pm

Guantánamo. A word and a place that have become a part of our vocabulary, unsettling and unseen, invoking some of the most controversial aspects of the war on terror since 2001.

FotoFest presents for the first time, Guantánamo. Pictures from Home. Questions of Justice, a rare glimpse into the life of the prison, the men who are detainees, and the U.S. lawyers who represent them.

The exhibition presents nearly 100 previously unseen photographs and video vignettes gathered by photographer Margot Herster. These photographs portray detainees from Yemen, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, and are accompanied by narrative from their lawyers. Alongside the photographs, there is an audio installation, Inside Guantánamo, with sounds and stories detailing life inside one of the most controversial U.S. prisons. In a video by Herster and artist Carolyn Mara Borlenghi, The Lawyers, six Guantánamo attorneys candidly describe their experiences and interactions with detainees.

Attorneys began visiting detainees and their families in 2004, after the Supreme Court held that the prisoners of Guantánamo were entitled to file cases challenging their detention. On February 20, 2007, the Washington D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed these cases. This decision could once again shut the door to Guantánamo, where many of the remaining 387 men have spent nearly five years in confinement.

“One of the greatest concerns the lawyers have now is that the degree of transparency they brought to Guantánamo could be taken away,” says Scott Sullivan, detainee attorney and professor at the University of Texas Law School. Pictures from Home presents what could be these lawyers’ final words and images portraying the detainee population and the realities of imprisonment at Guantánamo.

The photographs in this exhibition were a means of communicating with detainee-clients. In working with the detainees, lawyers discovered that visual images were an essential tool in creating dialogue. The lawyers visited detainees’ families abroad and photographed homes, family members, personal belongings, old snapshots, neighborhoods, and friends. Showing these images to the detainees became essential to building attorney-client relationships.

The exhibition portrays 37 detainees, where they come from, and their experiences in Guantánamo. One of the detainees is Fawzi Al Odah, the named plaintiff in the February 2007 Circuit Court of Appeals decision.

Gallery Hours: Mon - Fri, 10am - 5pm, Sat, noon - 5pm

Enrique Greenwell, From the series Igualmente

6-Pack
Open now through April 15, 2007

Featuring work by: Adrian Aguirre, Benjamin Alcantara, Dante Busquets, Enrique Greenwell, Omar Gamez, and Victor Mendiola.

Making its national debut, 6-Pack brings together the work of six young, emerging photographers from Mexico City. The show offers something for everyone: eerie urban landscapes devoid of inhabitants, emotive portraits of people encrusted in urban dynamics, explorations of the boundaries of sexuality. 6-Pack presents the artists’ collective thematic and technical democratization of vision, revealing their desire to understand themselves and interpret their Mexican surroundings through images.

Houston Center for Photography - 1441 West Alabama, Houston, Texas 77006 - www.hcponline.org