Biography:
Jerónimo Arteaga-Silva was born in 1972 in Ecatepec, Mexico. He studied architecture in UNAM and since 1994 he began to work as a photographer, since then he has published in several very important printed Mexican and European media. He has exhibited his work in Mexico, Cuba, Belize, Argentina, Germany and France. He was awarded the Prize of Anthropological Photography 2006 in Mexico, honorable mention in the Internationaler Preis to fuer Jungen Bildjournalismus (International Prize of Young Photojournalists) 2003 in Germany, the prize Latin-Martin Union Chambi 2002 in
France, Prize in the Political category of the Mexican Biennial of Photojournalism and Latin American Prize of Digital Photography, both in 2001. He has also been recipient of the grant of the program Young Creators of the CONACULTA (Mexican Arts Council).
Between 2002 and 2006 he lived in Germany and currently is associated photographer of the agency of Mondaphoto photography.
Statement:
Living in the desert
The first images on this photographic essay were made in 1998 as part of a small news article on the conditions of poverty that I found in some regions of the state of San Luis
Potosí, Mexico, mainly in the Potosino plateau, the region located in Valle del Salado between the Sierra of Catorce and the Sierra Madre Oriental, in central Mexico. That first encounter was with the beggars working the highway that goes from the center of the country to the border with the United States, later on, this project grew to include the communities from where those people came. What I found were small villages with hardly a few dozens of inhabitants and a very specific problem, there are no jobs and nothing can be grown in their land either. That is the reason why people are leaving their communities to go to live to the great cities or to cross illegally to the United States. "Living in the Desert" is not a work of denunciation, but a testimonial work and also a reflection exercise.
A black and white vision is of no interest to me; some of my subjects get by and some barely survive, I am not interested in defining welfare with my images. When the people whose picture I’ve taken ask me why I want the photographs, I respond that it is for showing them to other folks. I tell them that their life and the way they live are interesting to other people elsewhere in the world. As a photographer, the only thing I try to do, is to recognize myself in "the other", the "different one".
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