In 1978, Pedro Meyer entered Anastasio Somoza’s bunker and heard a chilling pronouncement from the dictator’s own lips: “These deluded Nicaraguans believe that they are going to remove Somoza and everything will be fixed, and it is not so.” While the National Guard sowed terror outside, his camera recorded the faces of a country that still did not know the price of its future.
This exhibition does not reconstruct a war: it makes it breathe again. It confronts power with its victims, hope with its consequences, and history with its bitterest irony. To visit it is to enter that moment when everything seemed possible and to discover, almost half a century later, that some words continue to burn.
An Ecuador brings together several returns: the commission for Smithsonian magazine, the 2002 family trip, the fall at Hacienda La Rinconada, the visit to the Galápagos Islands, and Pedro Meyer’s public return with his work Heresies. Edited with texts by Colombian-Ecuadorian photographer Yinna Higuera, the book intersects archive, body, and memory, moving from otherness to vulnerable power and from published photography to the image that the archive preserves as truth.
This exhibition stems from a personal experience: the construction of a house and the paths that led to the discovery of other territories. Pedro Meyer returns to the images from the 1960s that marked the beginning of his photographic search, where he discovered that memory and image share the same foundation: lived experience.
In this exhibition, Pedro Meyer immerses us in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca, capturing not only its landscape and people, but also the complex layers of its history: the pre-Hispanic, the colonial, and the contemporary.
