This slide show contains images some viewers could find disturbing.

Rodrigo Abd seeks out the places in Guatemala that most people avoid — hospital wards, prisons, crime scenes and mass graves. He forgoes the country’s lush volcanic landscapes for cinderblock walls and grimy alleys, seeing in each scene an echo of the nation’s recent past, where 36 years of civil war gave way to equally devastating gang and drug violence.

“For me it’s part of the same postwar,” Mr. Abd said. “The gangs, the exhumations of the anthropologists, the rates of murder, the public hospitals, the way the state is right now, the amount of killings because of the violence, that the cemetery has no space so they have to throw the bodies in a hole. This society with fear, so Catholic; this daily life, so close. People don’t trust in each other anymore.”

On Sunday, Guatemalans will elect a president in an election dominated by the themes of insecurity and violence. Mr. Abd’s photographs of gang killings and grieving relatives depict the issues driving the election, in which the leading candidate is a former general who promises to use an “iron fist” to quell rampant crime.

Mr. Abd, an Associated Press photographer originally from Argentina, has chronicled Guatemala since 2003. When he arrived, the country had known only seven years of official peace since the end of its bloody armed conflict between the United States-backed Guatemalan military and guerrilla fighters, many of them indigenous Maya.

At the time of the 1996 peace accords, more than 200,000 people had died and entire villages had been wiped out. In the cities, death squads had methodically picked off students, labor leaders, clergy and intellectuals declared to be guerrilla leaders.

The Guatemala that Mr. Abd photographed no longer suffered from wartime massacres, but was buffeted by gang and drug-related violence that unraveled what was left of the urban social fabric. While local and international media routinely covered the gang problem, he said, he did not see reporting that intimately portrayed gang members or that connected the gangs to Guatemala’s wartime history.

“I am not interested in the Mafia because of the Mafia,” Mr. Abd said. “I am interested in how people deal with life, basically, and try to survive in this Guatemalan postwar period.”

He described his projects — many of them shot a few frames at a time alongside traditional wire service assignments — as chapters in the history of that period. He set out to document the people and institutions that define a moment bounded by a history of war and dictatorship on one side, and the fragile promise of a more open society on the other. His photographs — often as brutal in their subjects as they are elegant in their composition — document constant, visible realities in Guatemala. Life beginning. Life ending, often bloodily. A society disintegrating.

Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press

In Guatemala City, a hilly sprawl of three million souls, Mr. Abd set out to learn the stories of the gang members, how and why they joined, and their internal codes.

“The human history of these guys” is much more important, he said. “If not, you will only tell the story in the crime scenes, you can only tell the story when the police captured them. You will tell the end of the story, but you won’t tell the story of how it works, how it starts.”

In addition to the gang series, Mr. Abd has documented the exhumations of massacre victims who had been slaughtered by the government during the war, and their reburial by family members decades later in traditional Maya ceremonies. It is at once a story of traumatic loss and of justice won. Here, as everywhere, Mr. Abd sees past and present imprinted on one another.

In a series called “Palimpsestos,” Mr. Abd explored that concept more literally. After he accidentally double-exposed some film in Haiti and liked the results, he spent three years in Guatemala deliberately re-exposing every frame of panoramic film that he shot with his Hasselblad XPan.

“For me, it was really easy and clear to interconnect the past and the present, and to interconnect the relationship between the powers of Guatemala and the suffering,” he said. “So basically, the idea was to try to find out if finally those things that, for me, were interconnected could be seen in a frame.”

His method was simple: shoot a roll, throw it — unlabeled — into a bag of 20 or 30 rolls of Kodak Tri-X, shake the bag, grab a new roll at random and shoot again. He did not know which image would be superimposed on another, what ghosts might speak to each other in one frame.

He also allowed himself to look beyond traditional journalistic content to landscapes, skies and textures that might interact with another image through alchemy and chance. The art, he said, was in the editing, choosing images that expressed his larger postwar idea.

Mr. Abd has photographed traditional Roman Catholic festivals in villages and is now working on a series about daily life in Guatemala City. But if his photos tend to capture the darker realities of his adopted country, he said, that is the essence of his job as a journalist.

“I think that those are las pilares fundamentales — the things that are really important in this period of the story,” he said.

Still, even as Guatemalans confront the violence in their midst, Mr. Abd sometimes turns his lens to subjects that hint at new beginnings. His photograph of the gang member El Chapin (“The Guatemalan”) kissing his wife’s neck as the two caress her pregnant stomach shows that in the midst of chaos, awe is still possible. Maybe even joy.