BY MIREYA CASTAÑEDA —Granma International staff writer—

• THE exhibition De este lado del mundo: cinco visiones fotográficas latinoamericanas (From This Side of the World: Five Latin American Photographic Visions), recently opened in Havana’s Majadahonda gallery, is an intimate approach to the everyday qualities of our continent.

Photographers Alain Gutiérrez and Daniel Hernández (Cuba), Pedro Guzmán (Dominican Republic), Eduardo Valenzuela (Ecuador) and Fuad Landívar (Bolivia) amaze us with more than 40 stupendous works.

They are amazing not because of the quality of the photos, given that all five have resounding résumés, but because thanks to them, we can reaffirm the certainty of Our America: equal, different, united by history and tradition.

As justly pointed out by critic Antonio Fernández Seoane, who writes on museography, it was as if the five photographers "had worked with a previously-conceived concept or narrative idea... but, far from that," the coincidence comes from "a shared identity."

Finding that "coincidence" is due, no doubt, to the incisive curator’s work by Estrella Díaz — moreover her first incursion into this difficult task — who was able to unravel those multiple shared characteristics and the artistic similarities, as well as in discourse, to achieve the precise texture of this exhibition.

This presentation of the continent’s everyday aspect is by chance. They are five photojournalists. Alain Gutiérrez is well-known among our readers, an assiduous contributor to this publication. The official photographer of the Pablo de la Torriente Brau Center, he could not be absent from this exhibition, a significant part of a series of festivities organized for the 10th anniversary of that cultural institution. Moreover, Alain exhibited his work, as an example, in the demanding and selective Ninth Havana Biennale.

Dany Hernández, the other Cuban, lives and works in Matanzas province, where his work has been shown in the important Leopoldo Romañach Salón de Paisaje (in Varadero) and the collective exhibition of the White Room at San Francisco de Asís Convent in Havana, and his photos illustrate the catalogs of the Hotel Internacional, Hotel Marina Palace and Hotel Playa Caleta, among others.

The photos of Bolivian Landívar, Dominican Guzmán, and Ecuadorian Valenzuela are requested by many different media in their countries, and they also work for international agencies and institutions such as UNICEF.

De este lado del mundo: cinco visiones fotográficas latinoamericanas opened on September 22 in the presence of all of the artists involved in the exhibition, and may be visited at Majadahonda gallery in Old Havana until the end of October.