Blood Summons
Koral Carballo’s photographic essays blend photography and oral history to explore the search for identity among Afro-descendant and mestizo communities in Veracruz, Mexico. Through powerful imagery, she uncovers the roots of complex family trauma, inviting viewers to reflect on their own connections to the past. Her project Blood Summons (or La Sangre Llama), a popular Mexican saying referring to the call to search for one's ancestors, represents both her personal journey and a broader exploration of historical injustices. With this work, Carballo calls for reparation, aiming to foster connection rather than division, and inviting viewers to engage with these stories and their own histories.
The Story Behind the Pictures
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“Telling this story is a door to the past that opens to understand the emotional wounds of the present. My mother has been a crucial figure for the beginning of this project and an ally in the process of starting to create.”
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"Mom slapped me several times. She kept questioning me as to why I wanted to marry a black man." Mom
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"I don't know what we are carrying. But I saw it in therapy. I saw someone they were beating . He was asking me to release him." Bro.
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“Black rain. In December when the sugar cane harvest season begins, the black rain begins in Veracruz since colonial times. The burning of the cane fields is an important step for the production season. There are still 18 sugar mills in Veracruz where Afro-descendants and mestizos (people of mixed race) still work.”
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“My sister's melancholy.”
The Winning Series
Koral Carballo
Koral Carballo is a photojournalist, documentary photographer, and visual artist based in Mexico. She studied journalism at the Universidad Popular Aútonoma del Estado de Puebla, and the Contemporary Photography Seminar by the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín (CaSA) and the Centro de la Imagen. Carballo has exhibited her work in Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, The United States, and Uruguay. She collaborates with Ruda Colectiva, a Latino-American women photographers collective, and is an Artist from the National System in Mexico.
