Photographers Blog

Our Father
thou art in Heaven,
in water, in air
in all our silent and broad latitude
everything bears your name, Father, in our dwelling:
excerpt from Chant to Bolivar, by Pablo Neruda

Caracas, Venezuela

by Carlos Garcia Rawlins

In a country where “everything bears his name”, the currency, plazas, schools, and political speeches, among others, the Father of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela finally has a tomb in line with his historical stature.

Simon Bolivar’s mausoleum stands adjacent to the National Pantheon, a former neoclassical 18th Century church. Although the Pantheon, with its colonial structure and its pastel colors, is joined by the foundation with the mausoleum, this new “skating ramp” of a building breaks completely with the surrounding architecture to become not just the first contemporary architectural landmark of Caracas, but also the first modern building erected by City Hall.

Bolivar said that when his work was done he would go quietly to his grave. As it turned out, his was to be an extravagant tomb erected to shelter the remains that a group of scientists exhumed to determine the cause of death, 182 years after the fact. The curiosity over what really ended the life of The Liberator had become a matter of state for the government of Hugo Chavez.

This year, President Chavez revealed another result of the study: a new face for Bolivar as determined from the reconstruction of his skull after the exhumation. In spite of that, the face of Bolivar can only be the one already in the collective memory of all Venezuelans. We see him strolling the streets, we can caress his face in our pockets, or we argue over him in the markets.

By Carlos Garcia Rawlins

I was standing on a raised television platform less than ten meters from “El Candidato,” when the scaffolding collapsed. It was nighttime in Barquisimeto, and with great difficulty I saw him appear, navigating through the dark mass of supporters. He was riding atop a pickup truck, waving to the crowd on the way to the stage. I could barely see anything in the darkness as the lighting system seemed to fail completely.

Just as I was about to take a picture, one of our platform supports gave way and we were on the verge of toppling onto the dark mass of people. It could have been a tragedy. It was the second collapse of the day, after another platform meant to hold journalists had collapsed earlier. In hindsight it was a perfect metaphor for what would happen four days later, when Henrique Capriles, a.k.a. El Candidato, lost the election to Hugo Chavez by more than a million and a half votes.

But for him and his team, losing wasn’t an option.

The rallies always had the same script, like a movie looped around to repeat itself. There were a few changes in light or in landscape, depending on the regions where they were held. It was a frantic campaign in which the opposition candidate toured all 24 states, four times. The state he visited least was Delta Amacuro, but he still stopped there twice.

By Jorge Silva

Before the recent election campaign in Venezuela, the last time that I had been close enough to Hugo Chavez to use a wide angle lens was last February when he left for Cuba to be treated for a recurrence of his cancer.  That farewell began as a solemn procession through the streets of Caracas, with Chavez dressed in black, riding in a dark van with open sunroof and an image of Christ on the windshield. His supporters showered him with flowers on the way to the airport, as he left his followers in suspended animation, and his future full of doubt.

This campaign was a re-encounter with him; one that many didn’t believe would happen again. His cancer disappeared from the agenda, and Chavez was back. For his followers it was the difference between night and day, or the idea of a Venezuela without him contrasted with his reappearance in power, where he had been for the last 14 years.

Whenever Chavez appeared the masses screamed wildly. If he were a boxer he would be an undefeated veteran, with many blows against him and without the same youthful agility, but with his own solid punch intact. To his faithful, Chavez remained the synonym of hope.

By Carlos Garcia Rawlins

When I show him a photo I’ve just taken of a fellow tribe member, he smiles. He’s fascinated and can’t believe it. When I point the lens at him and then show him his own image on the screen, his body retracts. He frowns, confused.

In the depths of the Amazon jungle, just 19 km (12 miles) from the Brazilian border, is the village of Irotatheri of the Yanomami tribe, that still groups around a fire. They live barefoot, semi-naked, and free. Until last week they had not seen any humans that didn’t look like they do. Never had they seen any outsider, let alone a bearded one.

We had flown five hours from Caracas with the Venezuelan Army to accompany them as they investigated the alleged massacre of 80 members of the tribe by Brazilian miners. We landed at a small shapono, or Yanomami village, consisting of a ring of houses in a jungle clearing. I immediately recognized that nothing would be the same for them ever again. There was going to be something irreversible about this meeting.

By Jorge Silva

About a year ago, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez surprised us during a routine coverage at his Miraflores palace in Caracas. He appeared with a walking cane.

That was the first time he had ever shown any hint of a physical problem, or indeed any notion of fragility. A few days after that, he left on a tour of Ecuador, Brazil and Cuba where he was hospitalized and received emergency surgery in Havana. Weeks later, Chavez confirmed that a malignant, baseball-sized tumor had been removed from his pelvis, and the saga began.

I’ve been covering Chavez for the last eight years – a long, grueling but utterly fascinating assignment for a photojournalist.

By Jorge Silva

It was during my eternal search for unique moments to capture that I was witness to the most spectacular and magical event – the arrival of a new life.

The United Nations announced the pending birth of the planet’s inhabitant number 7,000,000 for October 31, and that gave me the chance to work on a series of photos that became the most emotional and satisfying of my career.

The moment a baby is born is doubtless one of the most intimate and special in the life of a woman and her family, and sharing that intimacy as a privileged observer was sensational. To live that experience without having become a father yet was even more moving.

By Carlos Garcia Rawlins

The day William decided to change his life was when he woke up on the street soaked in gasoline and engulfed in flames. I met him at the Nosotros Unidos (Us United) Christian shelter in Caracas a year later. William, 39, doesn’t remember how many years he lived on the streets, stealing to feed his drug habit. He also doesn’t know who set him on fire. But he does remember the year he spent in a hospital recovering from the burns.

Surrounded by one of the biggest slums of one of the world’s most violent cities, the walls of Nosotros Unidos have, over the past 15 years, sheltered more than 20,000 people in search of a way out of the self-destructive cycle of drugs. With high ceilings and little light, and rows of bunk beds occupied by people whose worldly possessions fit into a small locker, the center run by a Protestant church offers free rehabilitation to people with problems of drug abuse and indigence.

The main therapy to those who enter the program is religion through prayer.

Douglas is on his third and longest stay in the center. Among the several violent incidents in his street existence was the time someone shot him with a homemade shotgun that used screws and nails as ammunition. His abdomen still retains the deep gouges from the blast. Inside the shelter it’s impossible for him to hide his joy when his mother and 15-year-old daughter come to visit him. He admits they are the only motivation he has to find a way out of the world in which he was immersed.

Despite all the opportunities I’ve had to witness the passionate support that followers of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez show their leader, it was a profound moment for me when I photographed a sobbing woman at an emotional Mass called to pray for his health after he vanished from public sight following an operation in Cuba.

Venezuelans had more than 20 days of deep uncertainty at the end of June during which no one seemed to know what had happened to the charismatic but tough 56-year-old.

Rumors swirled, fueled by the official secrecy, with the only line given by the government that the socialist leader had undergone surgery in Havana to remove a pelvic abscess, but would be coming home soon.

One of the daily activities I enjoy most is arriving home in the evening after a long shift at the office, grabbing my iPod and going out running. It makes me feel good, keeps me active, and more important still, it banishes all of the stress of the day.

But I don’t like running in a park or some other quiet place, much less shutting myself away in a gym to jog on a machine, which bores me very quickly.

What I love to do is run through the city, through the streets, without worrying about the traffic, skipping around pedestrians on the sidewalks. I always thought I was a bit crazy because of that, and then a friend told me about a big group of people who don’t just run in the streets, but they do it in packs at night. So I decided to document them.

The inhabitants of a Caribbean fishing village with no cinema, have become movie stars.

When I was invited to attend the screening of the movie “The Kid Who Lies” (El Chico que Miente) in the same village on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast where it was filmed, I had no doubt it would be a fantastic experience.

I could just imagine the excitement of its inhabitants seeing themselves and their familiar places on the big screen. But when I reached Ocumare I discovered that this was a place that hadn’t seen a movie screening since its last theater closed 40 years ago, and that this one would be truly special.