October 26, 2002 - March 23, 2003

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact Michele M. Miller
Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography
& Southwestern Writers Collection
Alkek Library, Texas State University-San Marcos
vox 512.245.1442 / fax 512.245.7431 / e-mail: mm57@txstate.edu

SACABO & RULFO
The Unreachable World of Susana San Juan --
Homage to Juan Rulfo’s PEDRO PÁRAMO in
50 Photoworks by Josephine Sacabo


SAN MARCOS, TEXAS -- October, 2002. The Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography celebrates another book in its award-winning UT Press
series--Margaret Sayers Peden’s English translation of Juan Rulfo’s PEDRO PÁRAMO in a deluxe hardback--with an exhibition of Josephine Sacabo’s luminous, surreal photographs featured in this new edition. In conjunction with the opening of the exhibit, a reception and book signing with Ms. Sacabo will be held October 26 from 7 to 10 p.m. at the Wittliff Gallery on the 7th floor of Texas State University-San Marcos’s Alkek Library. The program beginning at 8 p.m. will include Ms. Sacabo’s remarks about her work. Exhibit and reception are free and open to the public.

The imaginations of Juan Rulfo and Josephine Sacabo were both haunted by Mexico’s deserted rural villages (vestiges of the nation’s rapid urbanization of the 1950s), where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts. Hailed as the precursor to “magical realism” in Latin American literature, Rulfo’s modern hallucinatory tale is set in one such “village of the mind,” peopled with wisps of characters whose veiled lamentations never quite coalesce into solid storyline.

Instead, voices of the dead intertwine in a timeless mist, leaving the listener’s imagination to flesh out the fragments of two mythic tragedies: one man’s unresolved quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony, and that father’s obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed--Susana San Juan.

Finding in Rulfo’s dreamscape an eerie familiarity with her native Texas borderlands, Josephine Sacabo set out among the stones of a neighboring ghost town to bring to light (however darkly haloed), the woman’s story--that of Susana, “whose entire discourse is one of memory and delusions, delivered from her tomb. It is the story,” Sacabo proclaims, “of a woman forced to take refuge in madness as a means of protecting her inner world from the ravages of the forces around her: a cruel and tyrannical patriarchy, a church that offers no redemption, the senseless violence of revolution, and death itself. These photographs are my attempt to depict this world as seen through the eyes of its tragic heroine. It is my homage in images to Mexico, to Juan Rulfo, and to Susana San Juans everywhere who will not be possessed.”

Elena Poniatowska, celebrated essayist, journalist and novelist, and one of Mexico’s most widely translated living writers, speaks of Sacabo in ways that evoke the mystery of the artist’s multi-layered visions: “A photographer, Josephine Sacabo began to extricate--from the shadows, from the desolate landscapes, from the night sky, from the voices of the stones, from the murmuring of the dead, from the spines of the cactus--not only the patrón, Pedro Páramo, but also Susana San Juan, most luminous of all women, most inaccessible, most deranged, sanest, boldest…. When one looks at the artist’s photographs, it is clear that they are not the work of an illustrator but rather of an illuminata, a widow, a mourner, a tragic heroine, a Texan of ancient Greece.”

The new 176-page Wittliff Gallery/UT Press edition of PEDRO PÁRAMO marries Rulfo’s novel and Sacabo’s hand-toned and oil-washed, silver-gelatin photographs in a dual artistic vision of the same unforgettable tale. Margaret Sayers Peden’s superb translation renders the story as poetic and mysterious in English as it is in Spanish. The Wittliff Gallery exhibit showcases all fifty of Sacabo’s Páramo-inspired photographs that appear in this volume, from her series entitled El mundo inalcanzable de Susana San Juan (The Unreachable World of Susana San Juan).

“It is an honor for the Wittliff Gallery to be able to include Juan Rulfo’s PEDRO PÁRAMO in its book series with UT Press,” remarks Connie Todd, curator of TxState’s Special Collections Department, home to both the Wittliff Gallery and Southwestern Writers Collection. “Arguably the most influential Latin American novel of the 20th century--especially among the world-wide community of writers--it is no wonder that Sacabo was inspired by Rulfo’s words to create a fine suite of photographs. It IS a wonder--and our very good fortune--,” acknowledges Todd, “that they were available to the Wittliff for its permanent collection and for inclusion in this very excellent and unusual book.”

JUAN RULFO (1918 -1986), one of Mexico’s most revered authors of the twentieth century, came to define the style of an entire Latin American genre with his first-and-only published novel, PEDRO PÁRAMO. Regarded as the “quintessentially Mexican, modernist Gothic,” it became the landmark precursor of “magical realism” after its original printing in 1955. The story has since been published in over twenty-five editions and translated into more than twelve languages.

JOSEPHINE SACABO was reared in Laredo, Texas, in the Mexican ranchero culture about which Rulfo wrote. In addition to New Orleans, where she now lives, her award-winning photographs have been exhibited throughout the world, including Brussels, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Guatemala City, Lausanne (Switzerland), London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mexico City, Paris, Santa Monica, Toulouse, West Palm Beach, and Woodstock, NY. Sacabo names poetry as the genesis of her subjective/introspective work, and among the poets she counts as her most important influences are Rilke, Baudelaire, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Huidobro, and Juan Rulfo.

For more about this beautiful Wittliff Gallery/UT Press edition of PEDRO PÁRAMO (available through the TxState Bookstore and other major booksellers), as well as other volumes in the Wittliff Gallery Book Series, visit http://www.library.txstate.edu/swwc/wg/exhibits/bkseries.html .

The WITTLIFF GALLERY OF SOUTHWESTERN & MEXICAN PHOTOGRAPHY, in the Alkek Library at Texas State University-San Marcos in San Marcos, opened in 1996 as a creative center and archive devoted to the photographic cultures of Mexico and the southwestern United States. The Wittliff Gallery brings together a comprehensive range of work from the region—including photographs, serial publications, manuscripts, books, and ephemera—as it strives to provide students, faculty, visiting scholars, and the community at large a dynamic resource that reveals the significance of photography as a document of social realities and a testimony of personal visions. The Wittliff Gallery proudly houses one of the most significant collections of contemporary Mexican photography in Texas. Curator, Connie Todd. Assistant Curator, Carla Ellard.