Bravo by Felipe Romero Beltrán at KBr Fundación MAPFRE

Bravo, by the Colombian Felipe Romero (1992), is the winning project of the second edition of the KBr Photo Award, launched by Fundación MAPFRE in 2021.

Overview

Like many of his other works, Bravo offers a reflection on a scenario of tension and conflict: a stretch of the Rio Grande (known as the Río Bravo in Mexico) that forms part of the more than one thousand kilometres of border between Mexico and the United States that coincide with its course. Through images of people, landscapes, and architecture, Bravo constructs a visual essay, sober and poetic, centred around the idea of waiting and border identity.

Situated in the space where those who aspire to crossing the river to get to the United States are waiting for the moment to do so, Bravo is, in Romero Beltrán's own words, "an essay that records bodies, objects and architectures of a place that precedes, in this waiting, the border." To the extent that the migratory conflict that takes place on the Río Bravo has a continental dimension, Bravo is an ongoing, long-term project that, as its author points out, "insists on the implications and relations that the photographic document establishes with the reality it approaches in order to construct, from a stopped image, a gaze displaced from the generalized narrative, emphasizing the territory of the river as well as the inhabitants, who also constitute the border."

In addition to the monetary prize, the KBr Photo Award includes the organization of exhibitions at the KBr Fundación MAPFRE (Barcelona) and at the Foundation’s Madrid headquarters to publicize the project, as well as the publication of the accompanying catalogue.