The tango is the music of immigrants — Italians, Spaniards, Germans — who came to the area of the RÃo de la Plata in the late nineteenth century. They had left everything behind — it’s only natural that the tango is filled with nostalgia.
Despite the injustices and mistreatment that has occurred and still occurs in our societies, despite our violent history, two worlds — the white world and the Indian world — are intermingled in our culture, in our lives, in our being
This is a project I began in 1985. Every weekend I would drive out to the mountain. On those trips, I grew to know the wind. The wind is the voice of the mountain, the wind tells us when we are welcome, when it’s best to go back — it guides us…
Eros is a personal project, a combination of simple black and white portraits and nudes taken with no make-up or artificial lights. Please, if you are offended by nudity, don’t open this gallery.
The plains of central Australia are a horizontal chasm. One’s eyes can travel no more than a few yards across the flat continent, and they find relief only in the immensity of the sky. This region of Australia is the most inhospitable…
Romania is a country that suffered for decades under the black hand of a messianic government whose mission was to re-found the nation. In the name of utopias, governments have created poverty, inefficiency, cults of personality.
The first time I went to Rio, I was captivated — changed, in fact — by the city’s charms. “What are these uncomplicated people made of, that they smile so spontaneously, walk so self-confidently?
Cambodia has unquestionably suffered. The years following 1970 — first when it become involved in the Vietnam War and then with the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which murdered a third of the population — have left an especially profound mark…
The fictions of Mario Vargas Llosa
For Andes, a book published by the National Geographic Society in 2001, Nobel Prize winning author Mario Vargas Llosa wrote twenty short stories inspired by my photos. He authorized me to publish his texts along with the photographs, in this website.
In the introduction to Andes he wrote: “In Pablo Corral’s photographs there is always hope, an affirmation of life, a will for survival in even the worst adversity, that is seen in the most humble and mistreated–whether by their fellows or by natural catastrophes. And perhaps the images depicting the ability to survive, to withstand the elemental and terrible conditions in which life is lived, are the most persuasive and forceful of the collection. These photographs introduce us to beings weighed down by the oppression of centuries, people who have been exploited and then forgotten, people condemned to live amid precarious conditions and the constant awareness of death. And yet, nothing has dimmed the joy for life, for celebrating fiestas, for dressing in costumes and dancing to the stirring music of village bands, for parading saints and virgins in sumptuous processions.”
Introduction of the book 25
Photography has the unique ability to call up our past. Its journalistic, scientific, and commercial uses represent just a tiny percentage of the images captured around the world each day. The vast majority of people take photographs simply to remember.
When we press the shutter, we are saying Here I am; This moment matters, I matter; These are the people I love; I wish this moment would last. When we take photographs, we are rebelling against death, rebelling against the passing of time. This subversive act is the human act par excellence — only we humans are conscious of the passing of time, so only we humans can conceive the impossible: stopping it, freezing it.
Recording of a keynote presentation that I gave at the 2008 Educational Travel Conference, in Baltimore. I talk about my work and what I’ve learned from being a photographer. The parts where I showed my work were removed from this recording.
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Diego Oquendo Sanchez, a well know journalist who happened to be my classmate in Elementary School, interviewed me in Spanish (2007) about my life and work.
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