Photojournalism: Honorable Mention 2019 (professional)
ENTRY DESCRIPTION
Same Jesus and same Mary, just black. Same Christian religion.
According to the sect ‘The Legion of Maria” that operates in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, Melchisedech, the highest God, announced that “Jesus will come back again after crucifixion”, but he will come back in Africa, and black, to save all of them.
Superimposed on the Christian religion, with same traditions and religious structure, the Legion of Mary is populated by archbishops, cardinals, priests and deacons. There is also an African Pope. A very modest and small church has a big outside place, “The Holy Ground of Moises”, where only the faithful of Mary are allowed to walk barefoot. Sundays the place is inhabited by big wooden crosses, flags, pastoral staff, crucifixes, and parishioners dressed in capricious colors with medallions that have the image of black Jesus and Mary. The church has appropriated the central place in the slum, vindicating color and race, performing weekly miracles and reaffirming local identity and a strange form of hope.
AUTHOR
I am preparing a book of photography entitled “Streets of the World and their People”. I like to travel and encounter the world with its streets and its people, but the part that corresponds to my interest, my vision and philosophy of life. My photos are a look at someone's world, a journey into their space and their life; an attempt to build a story without affection, as part of a social commitment. Visual stories that intersect in the streets and in their plurality create a certain connection; a new sense. These images can be regard, a hand, a detail, a fixed temporality that captures movement, a state a vaster space.
Images that aim to reunite us with the common man, using a simple visual grammar that reveals the value of the everyday hidden life. They are the time of the people and the people in their time. Photos are the expression of my intuition, perhaps of my desires, my own synthesis of the world condensed in a moment. I hope these images arouse more suspicions than certainties in a way that is possible to speculate with them to open paths of contrasting narratives.
I like to walk around the city and photograph what spontaneously appears, but not all, a piece of landscape and the reality and the fiction that goes with it. Walk without a script to rewrite a monograph of the place with my steps, periods and images. Catch lights and shadows of the twilight that escapes little by little through the camera. Conceive an image in the span of a presence that transits. Focus on a smile, a necklace or a look. Give room to the universe in an instant and guess the mystery of the light that becomes metric.
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