Corrupted Testimonies: A Visual Contribution to Venezuela’s Fraudulent Banking History

The uncertainty felt by customers of the Venezuelan banks in 1993 was combined with the political uncertainty resulting from the Caracazo, followed by an unsuccessful coup d'etat and the destitution of the president on corruption charges. To make matters worse, oil prices began to fall in the early 1990s. So writes Luisa Leticia Rangel in her foreword to this book: a visual inventory of the collapse of the Venezuelan economy and banking system (1994 and 2009-2010). Luis Molina Pantin has gathered images of the ruined facades of bank branches, fractured bank logos, broken piggy banks, covers of books about the economic crisis, banknotes of various denominations circulating before and after the crash, and stills from commercials for the failing financial establishments. AUTHOR: Photographer Luis Molina-Pantin considers himself essentially an urban archaeologist. He refers to his practice of combing through his surroundings and creating series featuring objects, people, or spaces united by a common theme or subject. In his work, Molina-Pantin has assembled photographs of Manhattan gallery offices, structures built with drug money, cruise ships, international hotel chains, wax museum art figures, and images of landscapes printed on objects. He likens his practice of hunting and photographing to the act of collecting, saying that the photograph calms my urge to possess something that I can’t. Molina-Pantin has been lauded for subverting photography’s conventions of portraiture, landscape, and documentary in a wry and humorous way.