'Maya Healers: A Thousand Dreams' – photographs by Fran Antmann

Over the course of a decade, Fran Antmann photographed the indigenous healers, bone setters and shamans struggling to keep traditional practices alive in the aftermath of Guatemala’s devastating civil war. Antmann participated in intense, intimate healings and listened to the stories and dreams of these healers and shamans. Thirty years ago, such ceremonies would likely have triggered a brutal response; now they are part of a proud, resurgent Mayan identity.

Fran Antmann is a documentary photographer, writer and professor at City University of New York, where she is also a faculty photo adviser of the award-winning online publication “Dollars & Sense.”

Her photographic work has focused on the lives and culture of the indigenous peoples of Guatemala, Peru, Mexico, the Dene First Nation people of the Western Canadian Arctic and the Inuit of Baffin Island, Canada. As a Fulbright scholar, she lived in the Peruvian Andes, researching and recovering the work of Peruvian photographer Sebastian Rodriguez, and pursuing her own photographic project of the same town and people.​

Her photographs are in the collections of International Center of Photography, the Brooklyn Museum, the Haverford College Photography Collection, the Museum of Photographic Arts (Denmark) and various private collections.

She has received grants from many foundations, including the Ford Foundation, Agfa Corporation, the Social Science Research Council, the Puffin Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Foundation. She was awarded five New York State Foundation for the Arts fellowships in both photography and nonfiction literature. She has held artist’s residencies at the Blue Mountain Center and at Yaddo. (Half King Photo Series)

“Maya Healers: A Thousand Dreams” by Fran Antmann, will be featured at a book party and talk at the Half King Photo Series in New York City on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018, at 7 p.m. The talk will be led by Kate Doyle, Latin America analyst and human rights investigator, National Security Archive.

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