EL  INFORMADOR 1996-1999

(2024-2025)

In his late twenties, Luis Cobelo was hired as a photographer for the Venezuelan newspaper El Informador. Cobelo joined the paper in 1996, four years after Hugo Chávez’s coup d’etat, two years before this became president, and at a time when the country had 100% inflation. Almost as if it were a military rite of passage for men, the photographer was asked to capture blood-soaked scenes of crimes. The rawer the images, the more newspapers they would help to sell.

Cobelo documented death on a daily basis, although he also completed assignments for the promotion of shops, goods and beauty contests, for which he had to photograph stylish young women, and documented social family events including christenings and weddings. After three years in the post, the photographer could not bear it any longer and resigned.

Luis Cobelo was granted access to the archive of El Informador where he re-photographed hisown images printed on the paper as well as these by former colleagues. He also captured photographs descriptive of the instability that Venezuela was enduring at the time on a political, social, economic, andcultural level.

 He decontextualised all these materials by placing them along with photographs of family and friends, negatives, newspaper clippings, stamps, original ephemera, personal notes and others, in vintage photo albums found in flea markets. The artist’s intention is to return to the depicted individuals of their subjectivity, by extracting them from the sensationalised spaces of mass circulation and inserting them in family albums.

 El Informador is a multilayered and complex project that taps into notions of public and private, true and fiction in photography, ethics in photojournalism, unspoken men’s mental health, and macho culture and masculinities in Latin America.

Each album is unique and has 10 pages with 20 sides, all different.

Cobelo will make just only 21 copies and a printed book of 501 copies in 2025.