Lombardi / Photographer / Bolivia

Spotlights On:

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Embedded News

Called now "Dark Times" /1997-2001: Embedded during

four years with Bolivian Jungle Narcotic Special Forces

Being integrated into the troops, embedded, is a very recent form of recovery by war correspondents.

It can go back to 499-449 BC, during the wars between Greece and Persia, with Herodotus, historian present on "the ground", becoming one of the fathers of journalism, and in this case journalism in conflict situations armed.
In the 21st century, in 2003, 775 reporters and photographers were brought in by the US Army as integrants, during the invasion of Iraq...and so on...

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2023-Event Horizon

Pole Dance Serie. The Gravitational Lens. /Touching the Event Horizon... Κέρβερος καὶ αἱ ναυτίλοι τῆς ἀπόλυτ Technically, the description is brief: Pole school, dance, acrobatics, and aerial art. What is the axis? There is one, indeed, well anchored between ceiling and floor, a simple bar, we would say, but... not taking enough time and distance to observe, it would only be seen out of context: the illusory face, the mirage of being. But after a while, things become clear, and suddenly: cosmonauts without suits are sliding around "something," climbing, turning, clinging or moving away, turning and turning towards what astrophysicists call the Singularity, turning held from the same center, from the same axis finally revealing in its simplicity: there are as many bars as black holes, they are axes in black holes as we see in magazines, they are places where the known laws of physics cease to make sense, if that notion of sense means anything, another topic. It is then that I see every ceiling light reveal itself as so many constellations, that the density of what we call dark matter begins to be seen descending and mingling with Dark Energy, highlighting finally, by contrast, the cosmonauts enveloped in flows of photons. Photons pass, dancers spin, swim, float. αἱ ναυτίλοι τῆς ἀπόλυτ: navigators of the absolute axis. As we look into space, it never occurred to me that they could be provoked, here, now, according to the only will of those who simply surrender, letting Being and Being have a good time together. Great value of the human... even if they can simply see people spinning around a metal bar... In the end, everyone puts the dimension where it reflects better...

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2020-2023-MMA

Cerberus observes on one side the Nietzschean will to power, on the other the day-to-day will to control, and finally, with the third head: the tension between the two...

Of those who pass nearby, he will decide who enters, who exits, who to say yes but meaning no...

He plays for both sides, with mutual consent, and simply enjoys that.

Its nature designates him on one side, but it’s not incompatible with the other, quite the opposite.

He crushes, spits, barks, ignores, runs, or floats around. He’s just another filter between planes and worlds.

He is one of the Medusa’s beloved, and here is one of his reports...

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Highlands -Landscapes

Just enjoy the silence...

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2020...COVID-19
Plasticized souls and liquified brains

It is in all news from all media: the virus. In all gossip, discussion and debate, in every mouth, every word, every screen, every breath. It is so invisible that it can be seen everywhere. Fear of virus and virus of fear ...

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2019...Coup d'État...or not...

During the end of October and the all month of November 2019, the polarized country, divided between Evo Morales supporters and the rest of the population, with opposition supporters heading the movement, get to the streets.

Then, it gets as a strange movie: everybody against everybody. Police go to mutiny and finally, the Army calm down everything to ensure a transition government while President flies away from the country. Then, hard to anderstand really...we'll know it in some centuries, maybe.

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Welcome to Saltydise...

Some stairs made of salt blocks, in the middle of nowhere and leading nowhere ... everyone poses for the photo. Then, they get down to make room for the next group. With cities like Tokyo, counting as 6,224.66 people living per square kilometer, Japanese tourists who come to see the Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia have something to feel off the planet with. Luxury hotels, specially cared food, once facing the indiscernible horizon, they are left in zero gravity.

Then, your guide will bring you back to earth to entertain yourself to take photos in forced perspective, this strange local fashion phenomenon, a tourist "must see" and "must done".

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Black February

BLACK FEBRUARY / FIGHTS BETWEEN POLICE AND MILITARY TROOPS /February 12, 2003 - After the mutiny of several police regiments in front of a "gasoline" imposed by the government and an altercation between police and military troops in the plaza of the Government Palace of La Paz, two days of chaos broke out, casualties and wounded among the military, police and civilians. On February 12, troops from the presidential regiment and police troops were shot, using machine guns, snipers, attacks and counter-attacks, unleashing a mini civil war spread a few blocks around the government palace. The then President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada knew then his first serious internal problem, precursor of the confrontations of the following year (2003) that ended in his abandonment of the country.

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Broken promises

Like sandcastles thrown into the air, the promises and dust kicked up again, then disappeared. They had been rampaging through the highlands, biting the clouds and spitting smoke, flames, and coal. These horses of pure fine steel stopped finally overthrown by an invisible wall: that one of progress broken promises...

On the deserted outskirts of the small town of Uyuni, Potosi region, Bolivia, is the Great Train Graveyard.

This town has been an important transportation hub for trains in South America since the end of the 19th century. Plans to expand and build an even bigger network of trains out of there in the 19th century were halted by the collapse of the mining industry in the 1940s. Many of those trains were imported from Britain and abandoned outside Uyuni. A big part of metal pieces have been robbed because there’s no fence or guards surrounding the place, while salt winds of near salt flat have corroded all the remains.

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Disabled Protesters

La Paz, Bolivia -2016 - Abandoned by their government and their fellow citizens, the oft-overlooked disabled individuals of Bolivia had what felt like only one option: to march...

(Full Pics Version: click here)

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Awichas wedding

"Awichas" (Elders in Aymara language) - elderly in a home for the elderly with very low economic resources. Two of them married in La Paz, she was from the Quechua ethnic group, at the age of 74, and he from the group ethnic Aymara, at 84 years old. The two met for their love of music, since she plays the charango and he the mandolin. Now they live together in the home and claim that they hope that death will take them together, because they could not imagine alone again

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About Oblivion

May 2016 - La Paz, Bolivia - From oblivion to ashes: Forgotten dead bodies reduction in La Paz cementery

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Cholitas wrestling - The Origins

2004-2005 When Cholitas Wrestling just emerges in Bolivia: Firstly invented to help old classical wrestling shows, with no money, no press, no strangers. Cholitas wrestling begins his ascension with some two or three women putting everything in the spectacles, for their little public, mostly low class people and their childrens...Then, everything changed...get lost...

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Amazon Floods

Approximately 400,000 people have been affected by the worst floods in Bolivia in 25 years and most have lost all of their possessions. In Trinidad, the capital of the Beni district, an estimated 40% of the flood-hit victims are children under the age of twelve. These children are mostly still living in unhygienic makeshift shelters alongside the motorways, or in provisional shelters set up in public schools. Children and their families still require aid and the longer they continue living in such devastating conditions, the greater the risk of family disintegration.

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05.00: He's gone, we stay.

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Another time for medic...but this time he just escape...

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Long night coming...the final one

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05.00: He's gone, we stay.

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Out and Back

A friend goes so I came back..so simple, doesn't it?

We all loose friends, relatives, al life long. Sometimes we “understand” why, sometimes we don’t. I left photography some years ago, disgusted by Press, lack of empathy of the public, feed purposely by “the system” , so we just don’t have any visible reason to react in front of the “world out there”, neither our inside worlds...our own stories.
So I had a good friend too, then, one day, he just starts to die...I could say.

During about one year, I saw him trapped in the all cancer degeneration context, talking about suicide or travels, adventure or darkness.
Cancer mixed with hepatitis, bad and wrong diagnostics, false sold hopes, medics, natural things, even witches, doctors, examinations, all “the stuff”...until the end.
And so in a morning he asks me to take pictures of his “last moments”, to get back to photography covering him. I remember to smile and told him: “all right, you’re going to suffer because I use invasive wide angle, aggressive technics...I’m going to play with your face...” keeping in mind that I would be so idiot that he would have to fight more and more to get me out of his life, get healthy back again and send me to hell...
That’s the way I move, the way I have learnt : hurt me and I will react, get violent, and fight...that’s the way which saves me until now. I thought it was a kind of universal “first-aid-kit”, useful for anybody...And yes, I was wrong. Two days after he asks me to get my camera working back, he dies. So, at 05.00, I took the last shot on an old passed black and white roll. I felt hungry, because he didn’t react as I thought: he just surrender, he changed “the game” rules and territory: he gets to play “in another place”.
I get frustrated too, to see a so unoffensive guy walking away, leaving “us” in our trashy world. I can not blame him...But at the end, I get back to photography thanks to him...with a great renewed gift as a great renewed curse.