I first came across the work of Stephen Ferry (he describes it as ‘Non-Fiction Photography‘) when I was sent a copy of his 1999 book ‘I Am Rich Potosi’ to review (as usual, my review is no longer on line.) I found it to be not just striking images but also a fascinating story of a city which was once the fabulously wealthy centre of the Spanish empire which ran on the vast quantities of silver from this ‘Rich Mountain.’ The pictures present the remarkable story of the present day Quechua miners and their culture. I wrote a lengthy review, looking in detail at some of the images, and was surprised and gratified to get a very appreciative and detailed response from the photographer.
You can also see work from this book as well as his other projects on Ferry’s own web site, which unfortunately is another of those that opens in a new browser window that fills your screen (and on my screen that means is twice the area it needs to be to show the work.)
More recently Ferry went on a trip to the area of Colombia where Gabriel García Márquez grew up and inspired the ‘magic realism’ of novels such as ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude‘ and ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold‘. Márquez has described himself as just a journalist, reporting the events of the world that he knew in what most people think of as fantasies. And in the pictures that Ferry brought back from the fictional ‘Macondo‘ (and the real town of Sucre, Sucre in which he spent three weeks) at times support this thesis, as you can see in the presentation on ‘Lens.’
Don’t miss the other work on Ferry’s site either, particularly The Sinister Hand on the Civil War in Colombia. On a slightly lighter note you can also see pictures of Cholita wrestling featuring Aymara women petticoats in Marisol Khali.