A photographer’s odyssey

Images from 30 years in Latin America and the Caribbean

By David Mangurian

I first photographed development projects financed by the Inter-American Development Bank in Latin America in 1970 as a freelance photographer, and again in 1972, 1975 and 1976. In 1977, I was hired by the Bank’s Office of External Relations and continued what became a three-decade-long career of photographing and writing about IDB projects. Yearly trips of two-to-eight weeks have taken me nearly everywhere in Latin America and the Caribbean. I have traveled to project sites by automobile, jeep, truck, bus, train, airplane, helicopter, boat, dugout canoe and a few times by foot. I believe I have visited more projects and talked to more project beneficiaries than any other employee of the Bank. I have been to many places, seen things and met people tourists rarely see. It has been a unique and exciting experience.

The photographs in this exhibition are my favorites selected from about 200,000 black and white and color slide images I took for the IDB from 1970 through 1999, covering three-fourths of the life of our institution.

The region’s poverty, which so disturbed me when I first saw it, is still impossible to overlook. But the region’s accomplishments over the past three decades have been considerable. Latin America is a culturally rich region blessed with tremendous beauty, diversity and human resources.