The catalogue opens with a prologue by the writer Alan Pauls, who points out that, before very freely inspiring the name of the exhibition, Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña was a key novel of the 1970s whose shadow is projected into these powerful photographs.

The three main axes of the exhibition and the book are political violence, sexual identity and the role of women, all themes that marked the region throughout the 1960s and 1980s. The volume brings together a range of artists and thematic and aesthetic fields organized in twelve series, following a selection criterion which covers a surprising visual memory for its testimonial and technical diversity, for its intensity and epochal load, as well as for the enormous presence of known, unknown and even anonymous image-makers who have explored, documented or denounced particular aspects of the history of what Pauls calls the "bloody wonderland that is Latin America".

The curator of this collection is Alexis Fabry, an expert in Latin American photography and co-founder of Ediciones Toluca.