FISHERMAN´S OIL
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Dates2019 - Ongoing
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Author
- Locations Venezuela, Maracaibo
The landscape of Venezuela’s once robust oil industry lies all around fishermen and their families who live in villages clustered on the edge of Lake Maracaibo.
Their struggles on a briny bay fouled by petroleum seeps and derelict oil rigs are etched onto their faces and stained into their clothes.
Seeing these people and this place on an earlier reporting trip, I knew I had to return with my box camera to make black and white portraits of the fisherman and the industrial decay they call home. The slower pace and mood of box photography would help capture the poignancy and pain of Cabimas where fisherman live and work among idle, gray machinery. I thought it deserved using this camera because there was a special connection achieved in the “mean time” . That moment of waiting and silence does not feels the same, not for me neither for the characters in front of the camera. It is not the same as with the digital camera. While we spend our days covering the skirmishes of the international actors on duty, there are men, women and children who feed on fish and oil-covered crabs, contaminated by the constant spills of the oil industry on Lake Maracaibo, one of the largest in South America and its destruction is extraordinary, people are being poisoned and dying in all the surroundings.