Pietro Paolini

Carnival near the city of Potosì, Bolivia 2009

Pietro Paolini (b.1981, Italy) graduated from the Fondazione Studio Marangoni in Florence (2005). For the past eight years he has been working in South America, focusing on the new socialist countries, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. In 2006 he and four other photographers founded the Terra Project collective. Pietro’s photographs have been exhibited in Italy and abroad.His work has been been published in Le Monde magazine, Geo (France and Germany) and Vanity Fair. In 2009 he won the “Canon Young Photographers Award”. Since 2010 he has been selected to be part of the “Reflexion masterclass” by Giorgia Fiorio and Gabriel Bauret. In 2012 his work “Bolivianas” won a prize at World Press Photo in the Daily Life category.

About the Photograph:

“This picture was taken in Bolivia, near the city of Potosì. I was there to shoot a feature about the miners in “Cerro Rico” mountain, the largest silver reserve in South America. For centuries the silver was grabbed by Europeans using indigenous people as slaves. Today the conditions are not any better. A carnival day parade was happening and as always I had my medium format camera for personal work. I found these dancers getting ready for the parade and was able to make only two frames before the bear left. The bear is one of the most popular masks during the celebration. I think that those characters surrounded by this landscape make this image very surreal. Their posture creates a a kind of ambiguous suspense.”