Metamorphosis, Guerrillas in Search of Peace

Without defending or glorifying the guerrillas, Malcolm Linton, the photographer and author of Metamorfosis, reveals them as people with recognizable emotions, hopes and fears, very different from the image that many of the media projected for decades.

The metamorphosis that the book seeks to capture can occur both in the minds of those who turn its pages and in the lives of the guerrillas it portrays.

When reviewing, for the newspaper El Tiempo, the exhibition of the photos that make up this book, critic Nelly Peñaranda described it as “an opportunity to promote solidarity, appreciation and respect, to dismantle derogatory falsehoods and to work for tolerance and inclusion in a highly polarized panorama.”

The book does not offer a complete description of the conflict or the FARC, nor is it a defense of their ideology or their actions. It is an invitation to national reconciliation and tolerance.

Metamorfosis focuses on a real situation, and in that sense it is journalistic, but it is also metaphorical. The photos show not only historical events, but the psychological responses to them; the landscape evokes states of mind instead of just representing physical space; Images on facing pages complement or contrast each other rather than following a rigid chronological sequence.

The description of each photograph appears in the back of the book, with the sole purpose that readers can react freely to the images. The accompanying words or phrases hope to trigger an imaginative response, not an explanation.