Photographer Donna De Cesare traveled to El Salvador in 1987 to "witness and report on war...What she couldn't have known at the time was how the experience would shape the next 20 years of her life....De Cesare's work is essential to understanding a chapter in Central America's history that is too often whitewashed or denied.
Category Archives: Review Quotes
Donna De Cesare, journalist, photographer and American Professor, takes us by the hand into the violent maelstrom lived by thousands of Central American families from Guatemala and El Salvador, to Los Angeles, California in the United States. .. Her exceptional photographs open a window jolting us with a déjà vu, but her texts remind us of words from The Little Prince [by Saint-Exupéry] revealing “the essential that is invisible to the eyes.” As [De Cesare] states: knowing when to put down the camera is as important as knowing when to photograph.
--Julie Lopez, La Opinión, Los Angeles (translated from Spanish)
What people are saying about Unsettled | Desasosiego
Unsettled/Desasosiego humanizes a problem that is so great it feels insurmountable. Her [ De Cesare's ] photographs and stories show us the war from the inside and remind us of the confusing reality that there is no clear line between the good and the bad guys.
--Miss Rosen, Le Journal de la Photographie (English)
What people are saying about Unsettled | Desasosiego
While other photographers chased conflicts across the globe, Ms. De Cesare was preoccupied with a different question: what happens when the war ends... “Unsettled / Desasosiego” (University of Texas Press), is an urgent and moving work that chronicles those who grew up amid political wars, gang wars or both. It is a look back on lives that were lost, and some who triumphed, during her many years in the region.
--David Gonzalez, NYT Lens bog
What people are saying about Unsettled | Desasosiego
It is the enduring strength of Unsettled / Desasosiego that it does not allow us to see these young people as just ‘gang members,' 'deportees,' or as any other reductive classification. We, the readers, have before us the work of a photographer who did not sacrifice relationships for images. In the society of the spectacle, this is a rare and wonderful achievement.
Fred Ritchin, critic, curator, professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and author of After Photography and Bending the Frame.
What people are saying about Unsettled * Desasosiego
All of De Cesare's photographs are layered with enormous subtlety. One looks at an image and then one looks and looks again. Each photograph tells many, many stories … added to the fact that she works in extraordinarily dangerous conditions … Donna De Cesare is clearly one of the great documentary photographers of our time.
Mary Ellen Mark, Internationally renowned photographer and author of seventeen books including Scene behind Scene, Exposure, and Twins.
What people are saying about Unsettled | Desasosiego
Donna De Cesare’s long years of committed observation, her keen understanding, and her camera eye combine to form something as necessary as it is unusual: an essential history of a phenomenon. She describes the devastation of El Salvador’s youth carefully and precisely, and rids us of all the stereotypes. There is no shock here; only compassionate understanding.
Alma Guillermoprieto, internationally acclaimed journalist and author of numerous books including The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now