Colombia’s most famous photographer, Nereo López Meza, has spent the bulk of his 92 years working for his country’s top newspapers and magazines, traveling around the world with personalities like Gabriel García Márquez and Pope Paul IV, and capturing presidential visits to Colombia by John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. But he is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking photographic essays, which captured many areas of Colombia that had never before been photographed: deep in the Amazon jungle, up in Andean ranges, in the streets of Bogota, up and down the Magdalena River (made famous by García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera) – photos that exposed Colombians to areas of their homeland for the first time. López’s stirring body of work recently garnered him a Cruz de Boyacá, one of Colombia’s highest honors, and today the NY Times Lens blog has published a feature on him that includes 20 of his iconic images. The photographer now resides in Corona, a Queens neighborhood with a large Colombian population.
Check out a sampling of López’s below, and the rest of the NY Times feature here.
