A Photographic Life - 189: Plus Ana Maria Arevalo Gosen and Juan Aballe

In episode 189 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on the basics of photography, smartphone photography, documenting the personal and the noise surrounding NFTs. Plus this week photographers Ana Maria Arevalo Gosen and Juan Aballe take on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which they answer the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’ Ana Maria Arevalo Gosen was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and is now based between Bilbao, Spain and Venezuela. After studying political science, she graduated from the ETPA, a French photography school in Toulouse, in 2014. She is driven by the ambition to shed light on the effects of the current economic crisis inside the Venezuelan society and her work has an empathic, environmentally and socially critical focus based on long-term stories formed from in-depth investigations. Her project Días Eternos, about the conditions of women in Venezuelan prisons, is the recipient of the Women Photograph + Nikon Grant 2018. In January 2020 she was the winner of the Lucas Dolega International Price and in May 2020 she was a finalist in the International Women in Photography  Association awards. Also in 2020, Arevalo Gosen became a National Geographic Explorer. Her project Dias Eternos revealing the conditions of women in pretrial detention and prisons in Venezuela, won the 2020 Lucas Dolega International Award as well as the Lumix Photo Award 2020. https://anamariaarevalogosen.com Juan Aballe started printing his photographs whilst studying chemistry at University in Madrid and Berlin. After graduating as a chemist, he decided to devote himself to photography and visual media. He studied at the school of the International Center of Photography, New York, and later obtained his Masters in Photography at the EFTI School, Madrid. Juan’s work has been exhibited and published internationally and he has been awarded grants from institutions such as the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and the Fundación Botín. He has lived in Germany and the U.S.A. and is currently based in a small town in the mountains near Madrid. His first self-published photobook, Nachbar (neighbour in German), consists of 36 photographs from the same view of the building in front of his flat in East Berlin, photographed for over a year. In 2014 the independent publisher Fuego Books published his project Country Fictions, photographed in rural areas of the Iberian Peninsula between 2011 and 2013, in the aftermath of a profound economic crisis in Spain. In 2021 his work Last Best Hope, developed in the city of Oakland, California, will be published by Another Place Press. www.juanaballe.com Dr.Grant Scott is the the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). © Grant Scott 2021