Photo: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio
Julio Pantoja (Argentina) is a photographer journalist, teacher and activist. He was born in Jujuy in 1961 and moved to Tucumán in 1973 where he has been creating art that centers social issues, linked particularly to historic memory, identity and the fight for human and environmental rights. A professional architect and photo technician, Julio is also a professor and researcher in the communications department at the National University of Tucumán as well as a researcher at the National University of Rosario.
He is part of New York University’s Hemispheric Institute’s Council and was part of the editorial board of Atlântica, a magazine published by the Instituto de Cultura Ibero-americana in Portimão, Portugal.
Pantoja is also president of Fundación Infoto and is creator and editor of Infoto Agency. He is director of the Argentine Documentary Photography Biennial and has been a guest speaker in several academic and photographic events in Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, Spain, France, Portugal, Canada, and the United States.
His work is part of public and private collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Argentina, the Casa Nacional del Bicentenario (Argentina), Casa de las Americas (Cuba), the Art Program of the World Bank (United States), and the J. Paul Getty Museum (United States), among others.
He is co-author, along with Marcelo Brodsky, of Body Politics, Corporeal Politics in Latin American Photography (La Marca Publishing House, 2009), and of Julio Pantoja, acción fotográfica 1985-2015 (edited by Fundación Infoto). His photographic work and analysis are part of influential books such as The Archive and the Repertoire (Diana Taylor, New York, 2003), Fotografía en la Argentina 1840-2010 (Fundación Arte x Arte, 2010), Las grandes fotografías del periodismo argentino (Ed. Clarín, 2010), and Charlas con Fotógrafos Latinoamericanos (Jorge Piccini, Ediciones Bex, 2015), among others. For more than 20 years Pantoja has published works in the most important graphic media, both in Argentina and abroad.
Pantoja’s work is part of projects and publications at New York University, San Diego State University, University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Universidad Nacional de Rosario and the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. In 2011 the Mexican Federal Ministry of Culture (FONCA-CONACULTA) offered him a scholarship as an artist-in-residence to develop the essay “Mujer, maíz y resistencia” (Women, corn, and resistance). During 2013 and 2015 he was part of the photographic project Photographers Focusing on Beijing, aimed at creating a big scale photo-journalism project of the city of Beijing. His photographs have been exhibited in galleries in Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Paraguay, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Spain, France, Portugal, United States, Canada, The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and South Africa.