Introduction

There is undoubtedly a human cost to war. This cost – that is, the number of lives lost and people disappeared – grew significantly over the course of Felipe Calderón's presidency and indeed continues to increase at the time of writing. With so many murdered and the State heavily implicated, it has fallen to artists and reporters to represent this gruesome reality. This burden comes with many practical and ethical challenges. Bodies are frequently missing or have been hijacked, stripped of their humanity and repurposed to communicate messages of terror. The photojournalists discussed in this chapter must navigate these horrific conditions and find ways to report, document and condemn without losing sight of the photo's subject and their stolen agency. Given the complexity of this task, this chapter will concentrate its analyses entirely on work documented by the photographic lens, through an exploration of the award-winning photoseries of two prominent Mexican photojournalists. Their respective works capture the realities of this brutal war and offer distinct depictions of its topography and its victims. Specifically, I will discuss and analyse Pedro Pardo's La guerra de los cárteles de la droga (2011) / The Drug Cartels’ War1 and Fernando Brito's internationally lauded documentary photography series Tus pasos se perdieron con el paisaje (2006–2012) / Your Steps Were Lost in the Landscape.

The visual texts analysed in this chapter, alongside the works of Mónica González and Pablo Orta discussed in Chapter Four and the documentary features by Natalia Almada and Bernardo Ruiz examined in Chapter Five of this book, observe the ground-level impact of the conflict and its relationship with space. These photojournalists’ images are captured in two of Mexico's most violent and drug-conflict-riddled territories: Acapulco, Guerrero and Culiacán, Sinaloa. Despite their very different stylistic approaches, both Pardo and Brito depict a landscape of war on a regional scale that reflects the transmissible spread of drug-related violence across the nation.

Pardo's photoseries, commissioned by the Agence France-Presse, has won numerous war-specific competitions and most notably received third prize in the Contemporary Issues section of the World Press Photo 2012. As a collected work Drug Cartels’ War provides photographic interstices into the violent effects of the conflict in Acapulco, while also situating the city in the wider context of a violence-dominated nation as a whole.