Digital Photography Archive
Background
The photos below are digital photographs taken by Aguán youth during August 2025. For these young photographers, aged between eight-to-fourteen years old, using a non-phone digital camera was a new creative exercise. Their images, taken in a span of an hour, visually answer what spaces in the cooperative Camarones remind them they are home, even when they heeded from other cooperatives. Here, they photographed playing fields, each other (albeit photos with faces were omitted for privacy), the communal kitchen that feeds the entire community during lunchtime (which mirrors the communal kitchen in each cooperative), and the mountainous landscape that permeates their lives.
None of these images have been edited. They have been attached exactly as the youth took them.
Why does this matter?
The Aguán Valley is a site of much documentation within the Honduran news cycle, but the visual narrative is always created by external powers who paint an image of the region as an endless site of violence. Usually, campesinos are painted as criminals and usurpers who enact this violence. Yet the cooperatives run on an ethic of non-violence: firearms are not allowed, and the only instruments they have that could be construed as a weapon are the machetes they carry in the fields—an instrument adults and their children use to harvest corn, beans, squash during daytime working hours.
There is violence in the Aguán—but the campesinos are never enacting it. They are instead always at the receiving end. These photos taken by Aguán campesino youth show the side of the cooperatives that are never shown on the national and international news cycle of the Aguán. The cooperatives are communities of families, where generations are being raised to respect the land, move towards the collective as opposed to the individual, and where children, despite living in a war zone that seeks to displace them, are claiming agency over their own childhoods. Below, much beauty and resistance is found in these glimpses of their lives.
Photo Archive
Image description: two boys, ages seven and eleven years old, hold signs that they made alongside their peers (who stood behind the camera in this photo, with one young boy (aged eleven) taking the photo, and a circle of other children surrounded them. Their posters answer the prompt: what do you want to show the world? “
In blue, the poster shows a drawing of the Aguán river, fish swimming alongside the river bank– a sight that is diminishing because of agricultural pollution from industrial palm oil agriculture. That was one of the things the youth remarked the most about: how they hope for the river to heal and for them to play in the river like their parents and grandparents did when they were their ages. In pink, the sign reads two bullet points: “Los campesinos unidos gamas seramos vensidos” and “La Plataforma Agraria resiste en el Aguan.” In English: “Campesinos united will never be defeated.” “The Agrarian Platform resists in the Aguan.”
The landscape
The kitchen
The land
As part of the photography exercise, the youth were encouraged to be creative. Some wrote on the earth itself. The messaging below read: “Rio Aguan” and “Justicia en el Agua.” Translated: “River Aguán” and “Justice in the Aguán.”
More landscape
The youth were encouraged to take photos of the same place and play with the settings of the camera. Even in different hands, the images continue honing in on the nature and the areas they frequent together–famously the soccer field.
