Walking through Diego Huerta’s Portraits for Peace exhibit at the Mexic-Arte Museum in downtown Austin feels, at first, more like looking at pictures of someone’s adventurous vacation through the villages of back roads of an exotic locale than the representations of a country at war. But that’s sort of the point. When photographer Diego Huerta and his partner Dany Gutierrez read an article in a Mexico city newspaper about the ongoing drug war violence, they were struck by the numbers: more than 31,000 deaths in the last four years. “We decide to change the perspective of the 31,000 deaths,” Huerta told me over a phone interview. Gutierrez chimed in, “We wanted to change the narrative effect that we were constantly reading and seeing in the news.”

And so the pair took a year off from the world of commercial photography and set off last February to find the “good people” of Mexico, with the ambitious goal of capturing 31,000 portraits of people who wished peace.

The portraits are meant to portray “the Mexican identity, the everyday person,” explains Claudia Zapata, the Director of Programs at the Museum of Mexic-Arte and curator of the exhibit. In every war zone, there are babies who celebrate first birthdays; teenagers trying out love; men and women toiling at work. These are their pictures. Huerta’s images capture “The jewels of Mexico, the gems of Mexico,” explains Zapata, “not the violence, not the drugs, it’s the beauty of the landscape.”

As a way of uniting the images, each portrait features a blue paper dove, “La Huasteca”, in the hands of the photographed. “La Huasteca” represents peace, and, in the words of Gutierrez in the promotional video for the project is meant to “help us enjoin thousands of people that wish peace."

It’s easy to be deterred by the gushy idea and language behind the 31k project. The slogan of the project is “Peace Starts by Beliveing.” I challenge any Political Science student to write a successful paper on solving the Mexican drug war with that as a thesis. Even my High School Peace Studies teacher, who was such an extreme pacifist he opposed using mouthwash because it killed too many bacteria, would probably demand something slightly more pragmatic than “believing” for an A paper.

The surface-level positivity of the project’s message makes the authenticity of Huerta’s portraits appear even more striking, and powerful. The exhibit at the Mexic-Arte museum shows off Huerta’s eye for vivid colors and smart composition. He has that unmistakable talent of being able to capture narrative — a full story — in the single frame of one face. The emotions of Huerta’s subjects are subtle, but even the most cynical will recognize the genuine hope and beauty of the exhibit.

Huerta and Guttierez have used the portraits as a tool of intervention, installing hundreds of portraits across various cities in Mexico, and the idea for the exhibit was an extension of that movement. Watching the footage of Huerta installing the portraits in Mexico, it’s clear the images hanging on the clean, white walls of the Mexic-Arte museum at the corner of 4th and Congress carry a different presence than the ones hanging in the streets of Mexico. In Austin, the portraits give us a compelling exhibit. On the videos, what you see is social action, and one might intuit, a degree of personal courage.

Both Zapata and Huerta commented on the process of translating public street art to the more formal setting of a gallery. Like the images installed across Mexico, the portraits for the exhibit are printed on vinyl, which is an uncommon medium for a gallery. The vinyl material helps to capture the reality of the project, “makes it a little bit more, not casual….gets you to understand the real thing, you actually feel like you’re seeing that on a street,” Huerta explains. The “rawness” of the material with the composition of the photographs, which are “extremely high art,” make for an interesting juxtaposition, a glamorizing of the rugged, explains Zapata, “a dirty street becomes a beautiful setting.”

The printing on vinyl is also a reason why the Mexic-Arte Museum was able to feature a full-space photography exhibit at all, which is rare for the space. The only reason the museum was able to afford the exhibit was by using the same printer Huerta used, in Mexico, and shipping the images to Austin. “Mexico really made it happen,” Zapata said.

For Huerta and Guttierez, the project has been career altering. The pair, who were used to taking a few months out of their work in commercial photography for activist work, didn’t realize that the year-long 31k endeavor would turn into a life-long passion. They explained, “Definitely changed our way of seeing life and seeing portraits…I think that even though we didn’t know where we were going at first and of course we did miss getting and having our money, but I think that you suddenly notice that if you do what you’re best [at] and you can leave something behind that’s even better.”

And although Huerta explains that he is very happy with the exhibit, he is not yet satisfied. “It’s a small showing of the work, but people get to understand why we are doing this.” The goal is to ultimately find a way to show all of the portraits, and this is a stepping-stone. “For us it is very important to show the 31,000 not just 15 or 16…” Huerta says, “We still need to work so hard and find the resource to make possible to show the 31,000.”

Expanding the exhibit means reaching out to countries other than Mexico, and Huerta and Guttierez hope to have the funds to travel and install portraits across South America soon. “It’s a problem not of Mexico,” Guttierez says of the negative impact of violence, “It’s a problem of something in the world…try to get this message of peace and unison throughout.”

In addition to Huerta’s images, the exhibit includes a back interactive gallery, which features video clips, maps, and “becomes very Mexican 101,” Zapata says. The inclusion of the interactive area, where visitors can make their own paper dove and then pose for a picture in front of a backdrop of the Austin skyline puts a local spin on the whole exhibit. “The next leg of that is the Austin extension,” Zapata explains, who sees big things for the success of the project and its expansion world-wide. Already, there are three other doves in addition to the original “La Huasteca,” traveling throughout Europe and across the world, as a way of representing the projects mission and peace in Mexico. Zapata sees the movement as becoming phenomena “that, like many things, Austin tapped into really early.”

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The 31k Project exhibit runs at the Mexic-Arte museum through April 1^st, 2012. Gallery hours are Mon-Thrus 10 AM-6 PM, Friday, Saturday 10AM-5 PM and Sundays noon-5 PM. Admission is $5 for adults, $4 for seniors/students and free on Sundays. Click here for more info.