Saints in El Carmen

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Australia | Sunday, October 17, 2010 | 5 photos

Hello,

I am Isabella, I am half Australian and half Peruvian.
My mother, Manola Garcia Rosell, was born in Lima, Peru, in the 1950s, then she and my Australian father met and fell in love, so they came to live in Sydney, where my brother, Jeffrey and I were born. My mothers dream was to be a journalist, so now that I am on track in fulfilling my dreams of being a photojournalist, there is a deep sense of happiness between my mother and I. I am a zealous person, I feel wise because of the in depth cultural experiences I have had. I am ready to produce insightful, new and raw documentary photography, and i feel that I am capable of this.

I aspire to capture all the wonder in our world, to enrich our people with knowledge of diverse, rare and extraordinary cultures and practices. To provide wonderful insights into the colour, authenticity and vibrancy of the foreign world. With my artistic capabilities, fluency in latin languages, such as Spanish, French and Italian, and ability to integrate harmoniously with other people, the camera transforms solely as a tool to document life.

Whilst in Lima, I travelled on my own to a town I had vaguely heard about which tantalised my sight and senses. I set off to El Carmen, a very small African Peruvian town, five hours inland. The night I arrived there, I immediately met wonderful people, and these three ladies invited me to come in to the celebration of the black saint 'San Martin de Porres' in the towns church, I sat with them, I giggled with them, and shared soup with them. The story is a short but sharp depiction of a towns openness to difference and a celebration of a religious idol who was renowned as having rats, dogs and cats all eating and sharing food from the same plate. The way our current world should be.