Artist Biography
    
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Born in Cambridge, Massachussets in 1963, Jonathan Moller is a fine art/documentary photographer and human rights activist who currently resides in Denver, Colorado. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and received a BFA from Tufts University in 1990.

He has spent seven of the past eleven years in Central America, beginning in 1991 when he worked in Nicaragua. Since then Moller has lived primarily in Guatemala, where he worked with two different human rights organizations supporting populations uprotted by the civil war. As a member of the Foriegn Press Club of Guatemala, since 1994, Moller has also worked as a part-time freelance photographer in Guatemala and El Salvador.

His photographs have been widely exhibited and are in permanent collections in the United States, Europe and Latin America. His work has been published in numerous books and magazines including the LIFE 2001 Album: The Year in Pictures, The Photo Review and Double Take.

Moller received a 2003 Vision Award from the Santa Fe Center for Visual Arts, the 2002 Fellowship Award from the Society for Contemporary Photography, and in 2001 he was awarded the Henry Dunant Prize for Excellence in Journalism by the International Red Cross for best photo-reportage in Central America and the Caribbean.

Moller's upcoming book, Our Culture is Our Resistance: Repression, Refuge and Healing in Guatemala, will be published by powerHouse Books in September 2004.

Statement

In Guatemala, every clandestine cemetary that is found, every bone that is recovered from Mother Earth speaks of the people who were annihilated, of the homes burned, of the indiscriminate massacres. In short, they speak of the crimes against hummanity, of the genocide commited by the Army against the indigenous population.

Jonathan Moller's photographs speak of this. But they also show another face, the face of life, hope, redemption, and demands for change. These images both denounce and give a message of life. They inform while capturing the beauty of a passing moment that is fixed in memory.

Each moment captured by Jonathan Moller's camera passes into eternity, yet also gives encouragement for the future. Each moment sets an example for future generations, so that they may know the past, which is filled with darkness but also contains hope, struggle and optimism. Hope is seen in people's labor, in children's faces, and in the construction for a better life for all.

To ensure that the genocide will never be forgotten and that perpetrators be brought to judgement and punished some day, the content of this exhibition becomes a chapter in the collective memory of a history that has been officially denied. In the official chronicles, the events captured by Jonathan Moller's camera never occurred. There was no scorched earth, no massacres, no body dumps, and no genocide.

But the bones of the dead prove the opposite. The bones of the dead don't lie...

-Rigoberta Menchu Tum, 1992 Nobel Peace Laureate