Le prix Carmignac du photojournalisme est une initiative soutenue par la Fondation Carmignac.
Venezuela
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monograph
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12° Edition
Venezuela: The wells run dry
The 12th edition of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award is dedicated to Venezuela and its hardships at the individual, social and ecological levels. Chaired by Quentin Bajac, Director of the Jeu de Paume, the jury met in November 2021 and awarded the Venezuelan photographer Fabiola Ferrero.
Leobaldo Vásquez (65 years old) in Araya, Sucre in March 2022. He is a former worker of the salt mines and writes poetry about the golden years of his company: “seeing it turned into ruins, my heart is torn, and with the passage of time, they have turned it into scrap”, reads one of the poems.
This Latin American region was once an El Dorado bordered by the Caribbean Sea, which operated under a rich and prosperous democracy in the 1960s-1970s. It still holds the world’s largest oil reserves—ahead of Saudi Arabia—and vast mined resources (including gold, iron, steel, and coltan). Twenty years after the Bolivarian revolution—led by Hugo Chávez and his radical socialist reforms—the country is struggling to extricate itself from a deep economic crisis, marked by the plummeting price of oil, endemic corruption and hyperinflation (3000% in 2020).
In under seven years, its GDP has fallen by 80% and importing has been slashed tenfold. In the face of this unrelenting recession, an informal shadow economy is growing. While the results of the latest elections have gone unrecognized by the international community, the power struggle between the ruling Chavista regime under Nicolás Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaidó is dividing Venezuelan society. These institutional blockages, as well as accusations of electoral fraud or political imprisonment, generate frequent demonstrations and clashes. These tensions, combined with problems of instability, only worsen the living conditions of Venezuelans, over 75% of whom live in extreme poverty and suffer from severe short-ages of running water, food and medicine.
To date, 6 million Venezuelans— one in six inhabitants—live in exile in Colombia, Peru or Ecuador: the most significant migratory crisis in the world behind Syria.
Venezuela: The Wells Run Dry by Fabiola Ferrero, laureate of the 12th Carmignac Photojournalism Award, explores the disappearance of the Venezuelan middle class.
A prosperous democracy in the 1960s and 1970s, the country is struggling to extricate itself from a deep economic crisis, marked by the plummet-ing price of oil, endemic corruption and hyperinflation. Seven consecutive years of economic collapse and political crisis have widened the inequality gap and destroyed the middle class.
The Venezuelan photographer set out to document years of wealth that now exist only in memory. She travelled to places that were once symbols of prosperity, looking for the remnants of a vanished economic success story. Her reportage took her across the country, photographing the dis-appearing oil and salt industries and the communities that depend on them, the looted and abandoned universities, and the last traces left behind by Venezuelans who decided to leave the country for a better future.
Combining archival images, videos and photographs, Ferrero creates a visual capsule that documents the eco-nomic downturn in her country and the consequences for its people. She compares her project to trying to photograph a lake before it becomes a desert : if there is a time to document and leave a trace of the memory of who we were, it is now.
My family, friends and later myself left Venezuela, leaving only traces of a long gone promise. I went back to dig into the past to photograph the remains of a lost glory built on oil. This project is a search for a country that existed before collapse.
