FotoFirst — Travel to the Faroe Islands with Photographer Silvia Varela
Ciao Silvia, how are you?
Great, thank you!
What is photography for you?
Photography is an excuse to be a vagabond, an explorer of the world. It allows me to walk inside landscapes and into strangers’ private universes. As a photographer, you are simultaneously an insider and an outsider – an intimate observer – and this perfectly suits my personality and the way I engage with the world around me.
What is Finisterre about?
I am drawn to remote, isolated places and the people who inhabit them, and I’ve spent the last couple of years travelling to faraway locations. Finisterre is the result of this fascination: a personal journey through the Faroe Islands, a jigsaw-shaped archipelago that stands alone in the middle of the North Atlantic, halfway between Norway and Iceland. I travelled to the Faroes twice last year, staying with people I met randomly, photographing them, their families and their homes, sharing their daily lives and listening to their stories. It is part documentary and part fiction – documentary in that it portrays real people and places; fiction in that it seeks to evoke rather than tell. It is an intimate cartography of the end of the world, an imaginary map pieced together out of fragments, impressions, stories and chance encounters.
Where can you be found online?
You can see more of my work on my website. I’m also on Instagram.
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