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Its tumultuous past, marked by massacres, slavery, violent domination, coups d’état, revolutions and uprisings, often overshadows another narrative of Latin America: that of a vibrant, culturally rich region where art, creativity and solidarity hold a central place in society.
Throughout its post-Columbian history – the period after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in 1492 – Latin America has grappled with the tension between subjugation to colonial and imperial powers, resistance and the pursuit of independence.
This deeper, more sophisticated history – less defined by institutional crisis – now finds visual expression in História da América Latina em 100 Fotografias (History of Latin America in 100 Photographs), the latest work by Paulo Antonio Paranaguá.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948, the journalist and historian uses images as threads weaving together a transnational narrative of the continent.
The son of a diplomat, Paranaguá grew up in Buenos Aires and Madrid, learning Spanish before Portuguese and absorbing early lessons in defying dictatorship. As a teenager under General Franco, he read clandestine newspapers from exiled republicans in Tangier.
Back in Brazil, he began studying social sciences before moving to Leuven in Belgium and finally to Paris in 1968, drawn by its radical, intellectual ferment. At Nanterre University, he crossed paths with Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the future Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, joining the May 1968 protests that shaped his later activism in a Trotskyist group, the Fourth International.
That militancy took Paranaguá back to Latin America, where in 1975 he was imprisoned for two years by Argentina’s dictatorship. Stripped of his passport by Brazil’s military regime, he escaped with help from his French contacts, gaining refugee status and returning home only after Brazil’s 1979 amnesty.
Paranaguá began as a photographer in 1968, then joined the newspaper Jornal do Brasil as its Paris correspondent, later working for Radio France Internationale and finally for Le Monde as editor for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Alongside journalism, he became a leading scholar of Latin American cinema, publishing Cinema na América Latina: Longe de Deus e Perto de Hollywood in 1985 and editing volumes on the region’s cultural history.
In 2017, he co-authored History of Brazil in 100 Photographs. For this new book, he worked alone. “I appreciate collective work,” he says, “but to tell the story of Latin America, I needed more control.”
Rejecting national narratives, Paranaguá builds a connected global history of the region, covering Indigenous peoples, colonisation, slavery and migration – even the non‑Latin Caribbean, from Dutch Suriname to British Belize.
“National histories, even those of small countries, are inadequate to explain Latin America’s evolution,” he says. “Connected and global history challenge the old paradigm.”
Photography, he says, expands history beyond politics. “I wanted to develop, alongside political history, the cultural, social and anthropological history of Latin America – all the creativity that defined its identity.”
Drawing on archaeological discoveries, Paranaguá revisits the Olmec, Aztec, Inca and Guarani civilisations and the 19th‑ and 20th‑century archaeologists who helped forge national images in Mexico and Peru.
He also avoids cliches: the Mexican Revolution is seen through images of female soldiers rather than the usual portraits of Pancho Villa or Zapata; the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic is portrayed through the murdered Mirabal sisters rather than the ‘Generalísimo’ himself.
Alongside the great upheavals – wars, revolutions, dictatorships – appear peripheral yet revealing subjects. Frida Kahlo poses for American photographers, crafting her international persona; Wifredo Lam links surrealism with Afro‑Cuban culture. The Chaco war (1932‑35) is documented by the German photographer Willi Ruge in trench scenes that echo those of the first world war.
The book’s real treasure lies in Paranaguá’s archive work. The photo of Che Guevara, after the Argentinian revolutionary’s body had been put on display in Vallegrande, Bolivia, reproduced here came from Buenos Aires, not Bolivia. “Some archives have been digitised, but most remain in uneven conditions,” he says.
His images connect Latin America’s past to its present, revealing how fascist ideas, inequality and violence endure. A 1938 Nazi rally celebrating the Anschluss at Luna Park in Buenos Aires, filled with swastikas, mirrors the far-right resurgence across the region.
“These moments help us understand the present,” Paranaguá says. “Today’s far-right movements are not unprecedented – they echo our past.”
National independence, he argues, did not free Latin Americans from entrenched elites. “At the heart of Latin American societies, exclusion is the rule,” he says.
Class and corporate interests remain entwined with foreign powers – above all, the United States. “The political regression we are seeing takes us not back to the 20th century, but to the 19th, when the US sought territorial expansion,” he adds.
The legacies of slavery and conquest still shape the region. In Brazil, the violence of colonisation persists in state brutality and urban inequality.
Across the continent, Paranaguá says: “A murder is a cluster bomb: it traumatises families, communities and young black people, with impunity and devastating economic impact.”
In an age of AI‑generated images, Paranaguá values historical photography for its authenticity. “A photograph, like a letter or document, isn’t the absolute truth but evidence,” he says. “We’ll need ever-stricter criteria to analyse where images come from.”
In his latest work, Paranaguá depicts a Latin America that is unstable yet vibrant, brutal yet creative – a mosaic of tragedies and hopes for a fairer future. Far from a still back yard.
