Photographer Finds Her Anchor in Guanacaste

By Ralph Nicholson

If a picture paints a thousand words, then the photograph on page 115 of a new book: Guanacaste – Life Portraits, probably falls a little short.

What you don’t see in the photograph, which depicts lagarteros, or hunters, triumphantly holding aloft the crocodile they have captured, is the 12 hours that went before.

The photojournalist, Zoraida Díaz, remembers it as a hot day. A typical Guanacaste day of searing heat, the noise of the dry tropical forest and the slap and itch of a handful of different biting insects.

Ms Díaz was up at five o’clock on that Easter Friday morning to be in the Guanacaste town of Ortega at 6.30am. From there she followed a caravan of hunters to a tributary of the Tempisque River, where she trudged up and down the river bank for four hours, watching 20 men unsuccessfully search for a crocodile that reliable reports said had been spotted the night before.

Undaunted, the men and the photographer drove for half an hour through fields of sugar cane to another tributary, this time of the Las Palmas River, near Filadelfia, where the search began afresh.

© Zoraida Diaz

“I carried my equipment through kilometers of high, thorny grasses, breaking through behind the line of hunters who had sent a search party ahead,” she recalled this week. “By 4pm, hungry, half dehydrated, and with cuts and scrapes from the brambles up and down my arms, I was ready to go home….

The men begged her to stay, while they tried one more place, them through the water, the photographer through more thicket, with her feet sinking into stinking mud.

“When the crocodile was eventually trapped in its lair in chest high water, and the men dragged it out, there was little daylight remaining,” she said. “I had time for just a few quick, shots.”

Such is the tenacity and patience of the Colombian-born photojournalist, who this week officially launched Guanacaste – Life Portraits, her 160-page documentary, featuring 150 color, and black and white photographs of the region, its landscapes, people, industry and culture.

“The book is an offering to Guanacaste, an incredibly beautiful and multifaceted province,” says Ms Díaz, who co-founded The Beach Times in March of 2004.

© Zoraida Diaz

“After building the paper for four years, it dawned on me that I had a body of work, mostly unpublished, of images from Costa Rica, but the majority of them from Guanacaste, “she says.

Thus, the idea for the book was born in 2007.

“The idea of focusing on a specific photographic project deeply appealed to me, and since last year, I can truthfully say that every photograph taken has been for the book.

“It was a great catharsis: it took me from the ‘easy’ photography I had been doing to getting involved at a different level, working harder to translate what Guanacaste is,” she explains. “I started ‘seeing’ rather than just ‘looking.’ I got more involved, more attached.”

Ms Díaz has been taking pictures for a quarter of a century, from her early days photographing the Garifuna culture in Honduras and Guatemala, to her time as a wire photographer with the formidable international news agency, Reuters, based in Bogotá, Buenos Aires and Washington DC.

© Nina Monroy-Díaz

“I have always found time to do documentary photography: it keeps me anchored,” she says.

“This was especially important to me when I was working for a news agency, where an outstanding picture was promptly forgotten the next day. The short shelf life of the work I did made me crave for something more permanent.

“The documentary work keeps you grounded, so that you don’t stop caring.”

In putting together the book, by far the toughest job, according to Ms Díaz, was editing her pictures.

“I had close to 1000 images, that had to be whittled down to 160,” she explains. “I soon realized the task of editing my own work was too overwhelming and so I enlisted the help of multiple editors. 

© Zoraida Diaz

“I invited my friends to photo sessions in my home.  I’d bait them with the promise of wine and tapas, and then show them hundreds of pictures at any one time.  I’d note their reactions to the photographs; it soon became clear that for the most part, many pictures elicited similar responses.”

And when it came time to write for the book, she again called on the friends she had met while criss-crossing Guanacaste in search of a story.

Newspaper editor, Jose Manuel Peña, folk writer and agronomist, Carlos Arauz, Balo Gomez, of the Santa Cruz folk group Los de la Bajura, Miguel Fajardo Korea, Guanacaste’s renowned contemporary poet, Guadalupe Urbina, the folk singer and painter, plus marine biologist, Giovanny Bassey, all agreed to write for the book, sharing their visions of what it is like to be a Guanacastecan.

“The book is the result of a wonderful collaboration between professional writers, editors, photographers, translators and designers--some contributing from places far and wide,” adds Ms Díaz.

“And the best part is that they are all my very good friends.”