The decision to focus on youth grew out of an earlier project, Nosotras, which celebrated the women of Venezuela and \u201chow hard they worked to keep their families afloat\u201d, Silvana says. Returning to Venezuela afterwards, she found herself thinking about beach days with friends as a child, and the realisation that the country\u2019s youth \u2013 the generation most affected by the crisis \u2013 were also its future. \u201cWhen I had to leave, it was the biggest heartbreak of my life, having to leave my family, my friends and a place that I love deeply,\u201d she says. Photographing young people in Venezuela became, in her words, \u201cthe most genuine way for me to feel like I never left.\u201d<\/p>\n
The project\u2019s early years unfolded in Sucre, a state where Silvana spent long days connecting with new people. \u201cEvery place slowly became familiar through the people I met. The images would naturally develop throughout the day, as I moved through the spaces and conversations around me.\u201c As the book came together, fashion crept further into that process too, bringing in costume, styling and bigger crews into some of the imagery. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t call it fashion photography,\u201d she clarifies, \u201cbut fashion becomes a vehicle to explore the narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are two photographs that have particularly stayed with Silvana. The first breaks her own rule that the project must stay entirely inside Venezuela: a portrait taken in Mexico City, during a commission photographing refugees, of a Venezuelan girl having her hair done by her mother. \u201cI wasn\u2019t too sure about including the image at first,\u201d she admits, \u201cbut I kept thinking about the interaction I had with her and her mum. It highlighted the reality that so many Venezuelans have gone through. You could feel the heartbreak, the anger and the pain they carried.\u201d The second image is of Hendry, a barber she met while driving in Caracas, photographed cutting his friend Omar\u2019s hair on the terrace of her own grandmother\u2019s building in Petare \u2013 a place she would often visit growing up. \u201cHaving Hendry cut Omar\u2019s hair with such care, it resembled that brotherhood that I witnessed the days I spent with them. They took care of each other, and that is what it’s all about, companionship in hard times.\u201d Hendry has since emigrated to Spain.<\/p>\n
Nearly a decade on, Silvana doesn\u2019t speak about the project as something finished so much as something she keeps revisiting. \u201cI find myself always trying to come back to the images I first made for this project in 2016,\u201d she says, recalling the slowness of working with a medium format camera for the first time \u2013 a quality she\u2019s guarded carefully as the work has grown around her. As Venezuelan Youth becomes a book, that approach hasn\u2019t changed. \u201cThe core of everything, in the end, is still to explore our identity as Venezuelans.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The decision to focus on youth grew out of an earlier project, Nosotras, which celebrated the women of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":776875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-776874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/776875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}