canepari tells stories

It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen photos which actually told me a story of people and places I don’t know.
In fact, I read this post about Californiaisaplace over at It’sSomethingWorthDyingFor and as always I was curious who is behind those videos who show some other sides of California. So one of them is this guy, Zackary Canepari, a 30-something American freelance photographer with San Franciso as homebase. But his work includes much more than telling us stories about California. He also tells us about long-distance truck drivers in India, police fighting crime in Tijuana, an ancestral caste of camel breeders called Raika or the Rajen Babu Hospital in North Dehli which is the largest Tuberculosis hospital in Asia.
You can check out all these works either at his blog or at his webpage. And I don’t care if this guy has staged a photo for the New York Times or not. Actually no photo will ever be able to be the real deal. It can only come as close to it as possibe and I think Canepari does this really well or as his frenemy photographer Adam Ferguson stated “Canepari does it better”.
Above are photos from his “A river wild” series which belong to a larger ongoing project about Tijuna, situated at the United States–Mexico border. Part of Canepari’s discription of the project goes like this:
“tijuana has some issues (…)
narcoviolence is omnipresent.
the tourists have stopped coming.
street crime is bad.
corruption is common.
drug addiction is growing.
everyone is scared.
and poverty is everywhere. (…)
the tijuna river canal,
which runs directly through the city,
has become home to hundreds of drug addicts, homeless and
migrants waiting for their families to send them the necessary
funds to cross illegally into the united states. (…)
the migrants are too poor to leave.
the homeless are too poor to leave.
the addicts don’t really want to leave.
and the river is their theatre”.