These pictures are from a slide show with Donna's comments. Enter her Photo Gallery and look at the images and read her comments. I highly recommend it.

My Latin American Odyssey
Photographs by Donna DeCesare

Last month, I was sitting in a darkened classroom at the University of Texas, watching a slide show by photographer Donna DeCesare. She had been teaching documentary photography in the School of Communications for the past year, and on this day, she was taking her students on a visual tour of her growth in photojournalism.

Donna believes that the purpose of the photo documentary is, as Henri Cartier- Bresson explained, "to keep a journal with a camera." For the past several decades she has roamed the world doing just that. From the battlefronts of Latin America, to the barrios of Los Angeles, she has been telling the stories of ordinary people caught up in the events of a changing world.

And finally yes to Esperanza who I met so many years ago
in Los Angeles and whose name is Spanish for HOPE.

  thanks to gmtPlus9