Political art is not in fashion on the contemporary cultural scene. The global eclipse of the left after the fall of communism, and the hegemony of a neo-liberal economy and cultural conservatism have driven artists back to modernism, or into themselves. Art photographers in particular have fled from Postmodern cultural criticism, seeking to perfect and experiment with their dizzyingly variegated medium, or to register their personal dramas in images.

Photographers from the poorer and neo-colonized parts of the world have a greater difficulty in expunging politics from their art. They  feel a need to bear winess to suffering and to make manifest their indignation against injustice. Yet these photographers are globalized sophisticates, inmersed in the height of their cultural times and very much in a fashion that they co-create.

Guatemalan photo-artist Daniel Hernández exemplifies the predicament of the contemporary photographer with a political conscience. Featured recently in the "Heads Up: New Faces in Contemporary Art" exhibit at Aldo Castillo Gallery, Hernández attemps to work his way through the regnant apolitical genres to a political statement that does not give way to propaganda. He is a personal dramatist who needs not so much give his private problems a public dimension, in the manner of modern political art, as use the public situation as a metaphor for his existential agonies, and vice-versa.

Hernández’s project, which he executes through life-size black-and-white photographs, is to incite remembrance of Guatemala’s recent 36-year civil war.

Using his friends, he poses them in symbolic scenarios to honor the dead, and to instill a sence of the horror of violence, and of the danger from the political right. Yet Hernández can only do this through his personal sentimentality.

The "Eros and Thanatos" series is emotionally expressive and, indeed, romantic-running the gamut from political to personal emphases. However, Premonition is the only one of Hernández’s work that is successful in fulfilling the complex aspirations of his project. A large portrait of a young man’s head in profile, surrounded by a border of 12 smaller photos of bodies mostly cut of at the neck, Premonition is politically explicit enough to unequivocally communicate Hernández’s message, yet with great sensitivity. The man, whose face is close to the right-handedge of the frame, wears expression of reflective, even peaceful, concern as he contemplates his impending fate.

Hernández’s most stunning photograph, Pathway to Pain, which rivals in it’s clarity and piercing expression of complex emotion the still dramas of Japanese master Eikoh Hosoe, has no direct political content. We see a naked and handsome man lying across the railroad tracks of an old bridge. The contrast between his soft, supple body and his look of erotic pleasure, and the hard, unforgiving rails and ties admirably communicates the deep existential conection that Hernández discerns between love and death.

Interpreted through this image, the face of Premonition might be so peaceful because it signifies not only reconciliation with death, an embrace of it that undercuts the horror of repression and carnage.

Michael Weinstein is a professor of
political theory at Purdue University,
a Chicago photographic critic,
and a performance artist.