TARDEANDO CON UNINORTE FM ESTEREO · Uninorte FM

Imagen y Memoria :: la mirada de Linda Esperanza

March 13, 2026·27 min·2 clips

Linda Esperanza Aragón, a Caribbean cultural journalist, explains how her award-winning photography captures everyday life to fight against forgetting.

1. Uninorte FM Estéreo's Tardeando program features a cultural interview with Linda Esperanza Aragón, presented by hosts Lina and Karol. 2. Linda Esperanza Aragón is a journalist, multimedia communicator, and independent documentary photographer from the Colombian Caribbean, with a postgraduate degree in communication management for social development; her work has been published in El Espectador, Gato Pardo, and Fotogog. 3. The episode's core theme is how documentary photography and cultural journalism function as tools for memory preservation against the erasure of everyday life in the Colombian Caribbean region. 4. Linda opens by naming Toto La Mompocina — a legendary Caribbean Colombian singer — as the 'soundtrack of her work,' explaining that Toto's singing of regional memory parallels Linda's own documentary approach across visual and written media. 5. She traces her interest in the everyday as subject matter to a phrase from Colombian writer Juan Gosain: 'hay que quitarle al olvido lo que se está llevando' ('take from oblivion what it wants to carry away'), which became her guiding principle. 6. Her photographic career began with a Samsung phone approximately 10 years before the interview, and she later unified writing and photography as complementary languages for narrating Caribbean culture, memory, and the lives of people living near rivers and wetlands. 7. She grew up in Barranquilla but spent her childhood in a small Magdalena town, and describes photography as a way to return to and preserve the provincial texture — accents, street corners, neighborhood familiarity — that she felt disconnected from after moving to the city. 8. On the question of how anyone can be a photographer now, Linda distinguishes casual image-making from documentary work through three qualities: honesty, commitment, and patience — particularly the patience to return to a location many times because the defining image may not occur during the first visit. 9. She describes her workflow as 'half desk, half territory': ideas are developed through writing, executed in the field, and then reconnected with text when she returns, with documentary photography treated as 'writing with light.' 10. Linda describes her personal relationship with death as a lifelong anxiety that shaped her creative practice; she says photography, as 'writing with light,' became a way to reconcile with mortality and focus outward on other people's stories. 11. She was part of the 'Veinte Noches Eternas' exhibition commemorating 20 years of La Noche del Río, alongside photographers Wilber Lareus and David Britton; the exhibition ran for one month, closing on March 4th. 12. Linda describes La Noche del Río as more than a festival — it is 'a heartbeat of the Caribbean,' comparable to attending mass or Carnaval, and the curatorial challenge was selecting from 20 years of images while honoring the human stories of participants who come to sing from remote river towns. 13. She explicitly argues against the 'postcard Caribbean' — the cliché of palm trees, azure sea, and perpetual cheerfulness — and says she avoids it through slow, trust-based work: entering homes, patios, and daily life over time rather than producing immediate impressions. 14. She invokes filmmaker Agnès Varda's phrase that 'documentary is the school of humility,' arguing that the final byline belongs to the photographer but the story only exists because community members opened the doors of their memory. 15. Her female photographic referents include Graciela Iturbide (Mexican documentary photographer she cites multiple times), Flor Garduño, Adriana Alestido, and Caribbean photographers Roxana Charriz and Vanessa Romero, alongside national figure Natalia Ortiz. 16. She is currently a member of the collective Observadores Urbanos and, for International Women's Day week, curated the collective's social account to feature exclusively women photographers from Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. 17. On the question of whether to shoot in color or black and white, Linda says the choice is dictated by the story itself — her 20 Noches Eternas images are the only black and white in the exhibition, not as a stylistic signature but because the specific stories called for it; her Festival del Burro images, by contrast, are in full color. 18. She describes cultural journalism as a field 'born with challenges,' in that it must resist being reduced to likes and clicks, and argues its core purpose is to create collective regional and local memory — otherwise 'it's not worth doing.' 19. Listeners who work in or are curious about documentary photography, Caribbean Colombian culture, cultural journalism philosophy, or female Latin American photographers will find this episode substantive and specific. 20. Listeners seeking news, political analysis, technical photography instruction, or English-language content are unlikely to find this episode relevant.

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