Adriana Loureiro Fernández from Venezuela is the recipient of this year’s $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for her project, Paradise Lost, which Fernández says is a tribute to her generation’s search for change. The Fund explains that Paradise Lost encapsulates several stories happening at once, amounting to “an untenable situation framed by both tragedy and splendor.”
With Venezuela in shambles, criminals and insurgents run large stretches of the nation’s territory. We traveled through one of the regions under their control.
Venezuela’s economic collapse has so thoroughly gutted the country that insurgents have embedded themselves across large stretches of its territory, seizing upon the nation’s undoing to establish mini-states of their own.
Adriana Loureiro Fernández’s images of the protests and street clashes in Venezuela are dark — masked figures emerging from shadows, backlit by flames or wrapped in swirls of tear gas. People flash a gun or a knife, or show off stones that would soon be launched at police. She gets up close, which is bold considering she once had a fear of crowds. Still, she has gotten used to pushing herself, physically and emotionally, as she witnesses the political chaos that continues to upend her homeland.
There are 25 exhibits this year. In Sight is taking a look at five notable exhibitions from photographers Lynsey Addario, Adriana Loureiro Fernandez, Kirsten Luce, Laura Morton and Kasia Strek.
