Absences
Between Roots and Air
Hermetic Tensions

Between Roots and Air depicts a haunting portrait of an unsmiling, classically beautiful Mayan woman, her shawl-covered head held high, her eyes looking straight into the camera. In a country where Mayan people characteristically look away when approaching someone of European descent, or step off the sidewalk to allow the European to pass, Palma has said “everyone will be forced to look into the eyes of the Mayan people in my photographs.” Foiling the woman are fields and fields of makeshift crosses, marking the unknown graves of Mayan peasants, from a country where a thirty-five-year civil war has unleashed untold suffering on its civilians.