Winners of the Alfred Fried Photography Award 2015
Tururo Roots
Because of the great migration of people from the countryside to the city in Peru from the 1960s onwards, customs and experiences of coming generations have begun changing to the point of forgetting, in many cases, their indigenous past.
Tururo Roots is about finding that past within our own families (in this case my family), those families whom we often do not see for years and we know through third parties, who live far away in some forgotten place in the country where the relationship of man and nature is still very much alive and latent, where their customs, their beliefs, their joys, their weaknesses, etc., remain through time.
This series was held in the town centre of Tururo, in the district of Chincheros in Apurimac, Peru. Jury statement: In an ideal world, peace is the impression of a transcendental paradise. In a contemplative atmosphere that our everyday rationality regards as irrational and kitschy, man and woman, humans and animals, live in harmony with each other. There is equanimity, calm, gracious silence. There is no possession or claim to profit. Envy, resentment and fear are absent. The work of Peruvian photographer David Martin Huamani Bedoya, who lives in Lima but comes from the small village of Tururo, captivates the viewer with its archaic quality. The archaic sparsity and clarity of the simple rural structures correlates to the photographic visualization of the theme. This is no misty-eyed gaze on the beauty of mountains and clouds but a search for roots: the roots of the people, of life, a quest for sense, found in the infinity of indigenous families. Despite emigration, exploitation and separation, they feel connected, they form a unified whole, across generations, and even including nature and the environment. Peace, expressed deliberately in calm, old black-and-white, does not just mean the coexistence of the people in the region. Rather, it is a synonym: Everybody is responsible for everybody. Everybody feels responsible for everybody.
Because of the great migration of people from the countryside to the city in Peru from the 1960s onwards, customs and experiences of coming generations have begun changing to the point of forgetting, in many cases, their indigenous past.
Tururo Roots is about finding that past within our own families (in this case my family), those families whom we often do not see for years and we know through third parties, who live far away in some forgotten place in the country where the relationship of man and nature is still very much alive and latent, where their customs, their beliefs, their joys, their weaknesses, etc., remain through time.
This series was held in the town centre of Tururo, in the district of Chincheros in Apurimac, Peru. Jury statement: In an ideal world, peace is the impression of a transcendental paradise. In a contemplative atmosphere that our everyday rationality regards as irrational and kitschy, man and woman, humans and animals, live in harmony with each other. There is equanimity, calm, gracious silence. There is no possession or claim to profit. Envy, resentment and fear are absent. The work of Peruvian photographer David Martin Huamani Bedoya, who lives in Lima but comes from the small village of Tururo, captivates the viewer with its archaic quality. The archaic sparsity and clarity of the simple rural structures correlates to the photographic visualization of the theme. This is no misty-eyed gaze on the beauty of mountains and clouds but a search for roots: the roots of the people, of life, a quest for sense, found in the infinity of indigenous families. Despite emigration, exploitation and separation, they feel connected, they form a unified whole, across generations, and even including nature and the environment. Peace, expressed deliberately in calm, old black-and-white, does not just mean the coexistence of the people in the region. Rather, it is a synonym: Everybody is responsible for everybody. Everybody feels responsible for everybody.