Juan Brenner’s Genesis captures the evolving identity of Guatemala’s Highland youth, exploring their negotiation between tradition and modernity while reckoning with colonial histories and cultural rebirth.
Over five years, Brenner immersed himself in this shifting cultural landscape, capturing a generation navigating a complex interplay between inherited tradition and the reach of global aesthetics. His lens oscillates between the perspective of the returning native and the detached gaze of an outsider, offering a layered meditation on belonging and self-identification. The project, presented as a photobook, is a testament to the dynamism of a region in flux, its people crafting a contemporary identity while bearing the spectral echoes of colonial legacies.
At the heart of Genesis is the youth—agents of change who, for the first time, are forging an intelligible discourse with the wider world. Their aesthetic choices, modes of communication, and shifting values redefine what it means to be Guatemalan today. Brenner’s imagery resists the exoticization of indigenous life; instead, it captures the tension between resilience and reinvention. His subjects are neither static remnants of the past nor fully assimilated into a Westernized narrative—they exist in a liminal space, shaping and being shaped by a rapidly transforming cultural fabric.
The project is also a reckoning with history. Brenner situates his work within the longue durée of colonial violence, acknowledging the erasure and imposed obscurantism that structured the region for centuries. Yet, rather than a document of loss, Genesis is a study of emergence—a “process of becoming” that reclaims agency from imposed narratives. The Guatemalan Highlands, often portrayed as sites of historical trauma, here become spaces of kinetic potential, where young people articulate new futures through self-expression, resilience, and a recalibrated sense of place.
