Keasler and D’Ambrosio’s project, “Guatemala City Dump: Life at the Rim,” focuses on the makeshift village that is home to hundreds of Mayan Indians who have migrated from the rural mountains in search of work and better lives. Many of them were uprooted during a thirty-six-year civil war when army campaigns destroyed their former villages. Lacking marketable skills and facing a significant language barrier, these struggling new urban residents drift without work or money for subsistence.
They “move to the dump, rummaging through the trash to find, essentially, a life—food and housing. They eat what others have thrown away; they erect hovels out of scrap material. The rim of the dump is now a ghetto for Indians, many of whom stay for months, even years,” Keasler and D’Ambrosio write in their proposal.
Both the photographer and the writer plan to spend six weeks in Guatemala City interviewing, photographing, and gaining a sense of life in the community. Their focus will include “the uses made of wreckage, of the way lives are crafted out of ruin—in this case literally, dramatically, embodied in this refugee camp.” Keasler’s still color photographs will focus on living spaces and personal effects as well as daily activities at the dump.
“It is important to both of us that the depiction of the lives of the Indians is a dignified one. We think this involves a certain amount of restraint. Their poverty doesn’t undo their humanity, and losing their traditional homes doesn’t abolish their need for a place in the world. Community is inevitable—as are the touches of beauty, the enduring need for it, even on the edge of a dump.”
Misty Keasler received her bachelor of arts with honors in photography from Columbia College, Chicago, in 2001. She was named among Photo District News’s 30: Emerging Talent for 2003 and her work is included in 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers, forthcoming (Fall 2003) from powerHouse Books and the Center for Documentary Studies. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan. Her most recent solo show was at Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery in Dallas.
A widely published writer, Charles D’Ambrosio has an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Point and Other Stories (1995), a collection also published in England, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Japan, and named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has won a Pushcart Prize, among other honors, and been a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His essays and short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Nest Magazine, The Cimarron Review, Story, and other publications. D’Ambrosio’s New and Collected Essays will be published by Clear Cut Press in Fall 2003.
For more information, please contact Lynn McKnight, (919) 660-3654, or llm@duke.edu.
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