The Other Side of Memory:

Photographs by Luis C. Gaza

Drawn from an extensive largely unpublished personal archive, "The Other Side of Memory: Photographs by Luis C. Garza" features images that document the Chicano photographer's East Los Angeles community during the early 1970s, his South Bronx neighborhood during the 1960s, and his 1971 travels to Budapest, Hungary for the World Peace Conference where he met Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Curator Armando Durón organized the images as he sought to subvert the usual distinction between documentation and art that form the two main branches of photography, allowing viewers instead to construct a narrative of their own.The black-and-white images are not arranged according to place or chronology - the most obvious ways of presenting documentary photography. Instead, images are paired or joined to encourage the viewer to form new images from the combination witnessed. Works were also selected for their ability to evoke memory and to suggest that there is at least one other side of memory - the road not yet traveled.