ABSTRACT
Encountering the Chiapas Photography Project My fi rst knowledge of the Chiapas Photography Project (CPP) came during Christmas of 1998 when I was given the book Creencias , by Maruch Sántiz Gómez (1998). I was spending Christmas with my family in San Cristobal de Las Casas, in Chiapas, Mexico, where my father, his second wife Lourdes De Leon and my young sister were living. As a Christmas gift Lourdes gave me the book published by the sister project to the CPP, the Archivo Fotográfi co Indígena (AFI, indigenous photography archive). She told me a little about the two projects, in which indigenous people from in and around San Cristobal were supported to use photography to document their lives and cultures. I was immediately fascinated with the Creencias book, which was to become an internationally recognised work and a landmark in the emerging history of indigenous women’s photography in Mexico. However it was not for this reason that I was initially intrigued by it.
