Photographs and text by Stephen Ferry
Essays by Gonzalo Sánchez and María Teresa Ronderos

Gallery Exhibition: July 26- December 21

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Take advantage of this special offer! Order Violentology for $35.95 using the link below.

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“In this striking collection, award-winning photojournalist Ferry follows his 1999 meditation on tin miners in Bolivia (I Am Rich Potosí: The Mountain That Eats Men) with this equally unblinking portrait of human struggle. Shot over more than a decade, the images form a raw, arresting look at Colombia’s longstanding internal conflict, launched by the cocaine trade but now infinitely more complex. Unvarnished and often deeply disturbing, the work alternates between black-and-white and color, and between Ferry’s own and archival images… The breadth of this excellent collection accentuates an unwieldy and horrific topic, but one that is profoundly important.” – Publishers Weekly. For a full review, click here.

Violentology: A Manual of the Colombian Conflict documents Colombia’s continuing internal conflict, a complex and tragic war that is barely understood outside of the country. This photographic work focuses on human rights and on the struggle of Colombian civilians to resist the violence, often at great risk to their own lives.

The product of ten years of photographic documentation and investigation, Violentology investigates the political and historical dynamics of the war. It debunks the common view of Colombia’s conflict as a “drug war,” and provides the tools necessary to understand the distinct actors involved in this multi-sided conflict.

The photography book reflects and honors the work of the Colombian journalists, investigators and historians who have documented the tragedy of the war in their country. Its title refers to the masterful school of Colombian historians and sociologists, known as the Violentologists,  who have dedicated their careers to studying the dynamics of violence and civil war in their country. Gonzalo Sánchez, one of the foremost historians of the country’s violence, provides the introduction, while María Teresa Ronderos, an influential investigative journalist and editor of the newsweekly Semana, contributes the afterword about the possibilities of peace in her country.

Composed of dramatic photographic essays backed by extensive research, Violentology is a unique contribution to the photographic record of war in our times, and provides a valuable resource for anyone interested in human rights, Latin American history, war and peace studies, and US foreign policy.

This tabloid-size book is designed to engage the sense of touch as well as sight,  in reference to the act of reading a newspaper. Violentology is printed on the rotary press of the legendary Bogotá daily, El Espectador, which became world-famous after Pablo Escobar bombed the newspaper’s offices in 1989. This press uses a prize-winning heat-set process, which bakes soy-based ink hard onto the page. The paper is seventy-gram-weight bulky newspaper stock and is hand-sewn by a traditional Colombian bindery.

As an emphatically physical object, Violentology is especially relevant at this point in the history of journalism, appearing at the very moment when the printed press is being replaced by the web. It is thus a reaction to the virtual world of today’s journalism, a manifesto in favor of the printed press as vehicle for transmitting information and conveying emotion.

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STEPHEN FERRY has traveled to dozens of countries since the late 1980s, covering social and political change, human rights, and the environment. A fluent Spanish speaker, Stephen has developed an understanding of Latin America from over twenty years of covering the region. Stephen’s first book, I Am Rich Potosí: The Mountain that Eats Men (Monacelli Press, 1999), documents the lives of the Quechua tin miners of Potosí, Bolivia.

GONZALO SÁNCHEZ is a distinguished historian at the Institute of Political Studies and International Relations at the National University of Colombia in Bogotà, and the author of numerous works on Colombian violence including Guerra y Politica Colombiana. Sánchez spearheaded the presidential commission that wrote Colombia: Violencia y Democracia (1987). The Latin American Studies Association awarded him the Martin Diskin Lectureship for his outstanding scholarship and commitment to finding a peaceful solution to the country’s problems. He was a signatory to the famous “Letter of the Intellectuals” that called on the guerrillas to give up armed struggle in 1992.

MARÍA TERESA RONDEROS is editorial advisor of Semana, Colombia’s largest newsmagazine, and was president of the Colombian Foundation for the Freedom of the Press. She is director of the investigative site Verdadabierta. She is a maestra of the Iberoamerican New Journalism Foundation that trains journalists throughout Latin America. Her work has earned her the King of Spain Journalism Award (1997) and she was granted the Ipys-Transparency international Latin American award for best investigative reporting in 2004 and 2005. In 1996-1997 she was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, and in 2010 she won the Lorenzo Natali journalism prize.

Trade Paperback (Slipcase) / $50
17″ x 11″
184 pages / duotone and color images
ISBN 978-1-884167-39-3
Fall 2012