by Dwight Wayne Coop

Mostly we disdain colados, those interlopers who cut in front of us at the checkout line without gauging our objection with a glance. This is the name Guatemalans give to such people, and also to the last bit of anything pressed through a strainer—such as the final drop squeezed by sidewalk orange juice vendors. The colado label is also applied to delayed arrivals in a family such as José Carlos Flores who was born nine years after the youngest of his five siblings. As the final child of a prosperous coffee broker and his wife, he was destined to become a career colado. But he would not be the self-serving kind. It was through merit, not short-cuts, that he won a place in line to attend Amherst High School near Boston, Ma. Life in the cradle of U.S. political thought was enough to tug him toward political science as a major, but not away from editorship of the 1982-83 Amherst yearbook.

“In those days”, Flores explains, “all paste-up was manual. But it was still fun. The exciting thing was that I could take a picture and get it into the yearbook, (in effect) publishing it myself.

“As a colado”, he adds, “you get more advice than you could ever use from parents and siblings. Except for my mom, nobody thought I should pursue political science or the arts. So, to assuage them, I went to medical school in 1984.

“But by then I was already selling aerial photos shot from my brother’s airplane. I imagined I’d be happier taking pictures than treating patients. So after a year, I quit med school.”

By 1992 Flores was teaching political science at Landívar University in Guatemala City. A semi-colado at 27, he was one of the faculty’s youngest members and an evolving photographer. He garnered his first photo awards by recording classic Guatemalan subjects, like those in his aerial collection Quetzal’s Eye View (1996) and Holy Week in Antigua (Prague, 1998). He has won prizes in the prestigious Juannio and Gallo competitions, “but I don’t really care about photos that are merely pretty.” An Amherst mentor, Lil Kravitz, taught him that a picture’s subject matters little; it is what the picture says that counts.

Toward this end, he rolled up his artistic sleeves and sought out maras (young urban gangsters) for a 2000 photo essay, Guatemalan Tattoos. Another stark black-and-white essay, Cognitive Dissonance, appeared the same year. He later ventured into palenques (cockfight arenas) and brothels to portray bettors and ladies of the night in their elements. Though anguished over what he finds in such places, Flores documents it in a way that educates without veering into morbid voyeurism. But access to a women’s prison was challenging. “The jailers practically arrested me when I showed up. They interrogated me for four hours. They couldn’t guess what I was after.”

His goal was to bring some light into prison dormitories, where inmate mothers have their children with them. “It’s sad having to spend part of your childhood in a jail,” Flores sighs, “yet the public needs to know of these people’s plight.” He sets an example at Christmas by bringing a Santa Claus to entertain and pass out presents. “But if the authorities suspect for a moment that I’m looking to make trouble for them, they’ll exclude me forever. There’s a precarious balance.”

Even without a degree in photography, he teaches it to architects and graphic designers. As a validation of his photographic ability, in 2000 Flores won first prize in a world-wide competition, New York’s Popular Photography contest.

One day in 2004 Flores was microwaving a stuffed guicoy (squash). Like other artists (and professors), he could be distracted; but days, not minutes, elapsed before his return to the oven. His snack was now nothing recognizable.

“It’d grown in size from a tennis ball to a soccer ball. It was this bloated, puffy, hairy mass. Beautiful, in its own way, but probably not too edible.” Transitory, too. After removing the “thing” from its shelter of darkness, it began imploding. “It collapsed before I thought to grab my camera. My wife Roxana was disgusted. She wanted to chuck it right then. But I saw in it the spontaneous creation of an ecosystem.” Flores wishes he could recall the recipe. “If I tried to do it over, it probably wouldn’t work.”

The gooey morass housed a galaxy of organic dynamism. Breathing through his mouth, he examined the material on a glass pane with sunlight filtering through, “I couldn’t believe all I saw; infinite textures and absolutely brilliant colors.”

He photographed and did an overlay onto normal photos to achieve a thrilling paint-like effect. Could the chaos of organic decomposition yield more surprises? After some trial and error, and as much scientific methodology as he could apply under the circumstances, he found that it could.

“For instance, I used rotting cabbage fibers to good effect. But organic breakdown is hardly orderly, so each overlay I prepare is unique.” Flores understood the biology of rotting tissues from his pre-med stint studying the hard sciences.

Last summer, he exhibited the first project featuring what the cultural media dubbed the Flores Zoentropy Effect—the legacy of the debut of the puff-bally squash and the experiments that followed. The biological entropy (dynamic breakdown) he employs as an artistic filter is a metaphor for the social entropy that, as a social scientist, he cannot help but notice. Zoentropic imaging enables him to “paint” visions of social decay in the light of organic decay.

Not every pairing of subjective photography with zoentropy requires fieldwork on society’s margins. In his 2004 essays Genesis, The Creation of Man and Leviticus 18, he juxtaposes the order of posed human nudity with the disorder of zoentropy. These shots, which feature from two to five of Flores’ friends in allegorical poses, examine creation against a background of chaos. The zoentropic element muffles any tastelessness that besots the bare images.

Flores, though only 39, has ascended the peaks of two professions. He is ever the colado the last but not the least; a man who has merged political science and art, order and entropy—a man who never needs to cut in any line.