In a country where life is worth nothing, a photographic negative, which represents perhaps the smallest part of a life, is worth infinitely nothing. Charles Bowden arrived at the photographic archive of Diario de Juárez late on a spring day in 1993. He was looking for a photograph of a missing woman and the clerk called me to find it. It was our first meeting. Neither of us realized at the time that we would end up collaborating on three books: Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (1998); Exodus/Éxodo (2008); and Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields (2010). Part of my task was introducing Chuck to my city and the newspaper world in which I worked. “Archive” is a pretentious description of the narrow room where we photographers finished our work after an intense day during which some of us risked our lives. By routine, the man in charge, or his two subordinates, periodically destroyed original photos and negatives that were considered unnecessary, in order to make room for new material that, in time, would also go into the garbage. On the 10th anniversary of the 1986 international bridge-takings and blockades by the right-wing party protesting the electoral fraud, only one slide remained of what had been the biggest post-election challenge in the history of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). When I went looking for slides of a birth defect perhaps caused by a maquiladora worker’s inhalation of toxins, I found that they had been discarded as “no longer good for anything.” They also tossed slides of the April 1996 apprehension of Los Rebeldes, a gang of men accused of murdering several women. I had photographed tearful mothers of the murdered women confronting the state governor at the end of a public ceremony. As the only

中文翻译：

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Carlos y Mí Ciudad / Charles Bowden 和 My Ciudad Juárez

在一个生命一文不值的国家，一张照片底片，也许代表了生命中最小的一部分，却一文不值。查尔斯·鲍登在 1993 年春末的一个春日抵达 Dirio de Juárez 的摄影档案馆。他正在寻找一张失踪妇女的照片，店员叫我找到它。那是我们的第一次见面。当时我们都没有意识到我们最终会合作编写三本书：华雷斯：我们未来的实验室（1998）；出埃及记/Éxodo (2008); 和谋杀之城：华雷斯城和全球经济的新杀戮场（2010 年）。我的部分任务是将查克介绍给我所在的城市和我工作的报业界。“档案”是对我们摄影师在紧张的一天之后完成工作的狭窄房间的自命不凡的描述，在此期间我们中的一些人冒着生命危险。按照惯例，负责人或他的两个下属会定期销毁被认为不必要的原始照片和底片，以便为新材料腾出空间，这些材料及时也会被扔进垃圾桶。在 1986 年抗议选举舞弊的右翼政党在国际上架桥和封锁 10 周年之际，革命党 (PRI) 历史上最大的选举后挑战只剩下一张幻灯片。当我去寻找可能是由加工厂工人吸入毒素引起的先天缺陷的幻灯片时，我发现它们已被丢弃，因为“不再有任何用处”。他们还抛出了 1996 年 4 月逮捕 Los Rebeldes 的幻灯片，这是一群被控谋杀几名妇女的男子。我拍摄了在公共仪式结束时与州长面对面的被谋杀妇女的泪流满面的母亲。作为唯一