Al otro lado
Misha Vallejo
Self-Published
Edited by Claudi Carreras
Portuguese and English
Hardcover
104 pages
240 x 165mm
2006
ISBN 9788569557098
This is a visual project about the everyday life of the inhabitants of Puerto Nuevo, a small village located on the Ecuadorean side of the border with Colombia. Colombian displaced people who fled armed conflict between the FARC guerrilla, drug dealers and their government, founded this village in a hard to reach area of the Amazon Rainforest. In this border town, violence and poverty do not distinguish between nationalities. Here, the border is omnipresent and does not exist at the same time. This is a village where its inhabitants do not know what it means to live in Ecuador or Colombia, but certainly know what it is to live on the other side. The book combines a classical documentary approach with facsimiles of everyday life objects and vernacular photographs made by the inhabitants of the town before leaving their homeland. Al otro lado is a book that lies on the brink between documentary and art photography. It explores an issue that is avoided by mainstream media and therefore not well known, talking about it in a literary form. The result is a touching portrait of exile.
About the Artist
Misha Vallejo was born in 1985 in Riobamba, Ecuador. He is a photographer whose work lies between documentary and art photography. In 2014 he completed his MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London and in 2010 he finished the St. Petersburg Faculty of Photojournalism in Russia. He works as a freelance photographer since 2010 and is a member of the photography collective Runa Photos since 2012. He has given photography and image-driven workshops in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. Currently he is based in Quito, Ecuador and works throughout Latin America.
mishavallejo.com
