Picturing the Peasant in Orlando Fals Borda’s Work 1950s-1970s

Orlando Fals Borda, a renowned Colombian sociologist, who worked for both the academia and the government from the 1950s to 90s, wrote two works on Colombian peasantry and its relation with big landowners that were published with a selection of photographs of peasants, landowners, and grassroots movements. These works and their images have had an impact on the construction of peasant- and landowner visual icons in recent Colombian history, as they have been used in books, primers, and exhibitions since their creation, and they had a crucial influence on the visual propaganda of the Agrarian Reform project in Colombia. As a result of Fals’s fieldwork, there are two photograph collections kept at two institutions in Colombia that have organized and catalogued the images: The Central Bank in Montería and the National University in Bogotá. These institutions are prime creators of the visual memory of rural Colombia and I analyze Fals’s fieldwork as part of a jigsaw puzzle in which peasants, landowners, and intellectuals, like Fals, both consumed and created visual icons of land, rurality, and peasantry in Colombia’s recent history. Keywords: Agrarian Reform, Colombia, landowners, Orlando Fals Borda, peasants, photography.