Adriana Loureiro Fernández’s images of the protests and street clashes in Venezuela are dark — masked figures emerging from shadows, backlit by flames or wrapped in swirls of tear gas. People flash a gun or a knife, or show off stones that would soon be launched at police. She gets up close, which is bold considering she once had a fear of crowds. Still, she has gotten used to pushing herself, physically and emotionally, as she witnesses the political chaos that continues to upend her homeland.
Her style and subject came about from her earliest days of photography, around 2010, when as a college student she started tagging along with friends in Caracas who were into graffiti. She shot at night with only available light — a flash would have given away her friends — moving through deserted streets.
“The city was dangerous and empty, only poor people, drunks and us remained,” she said. “But it was a glimpse of what Venezuela has become now. We saw many things. We got robbed. Police told us they would arrest us unless we handed over what we had. We saw violence. We saw a little bit of everything at night.”
After a year in New York for graduate studies, Ms. Loureiro Fernández has returned to Caracas at a time when the country’s future is once again at a critical point. President Nicolás Maduro has vowed to proceed with his plans to convene a constituent assembly and revise the country’s constitution, a move opponents fear will subvert democracy and install a dictatorship. The opposition recently held a referendum in which some 98 percent of the 7.5 million voters rejected the assembly, though the poll was unofficial and nonbinding. In the meantime, almost 100 people have been killed during protests and confrontations. As it has been for years, the situation remains unsettled and unsettling.
“The single thing that did become clear after the plebiscite is that a great number of people do not want to move forward with the constituent assembly and that the government is not willing to listen,” said Ms. Loureiro Fernández, 28. “This is worrisome for whatever is left of our democracy. In the meantime, violence is escalating along with frustration because people, especially young people, feel disenfranchised, powerless.”
Ms. Loureiro Fernández took up photography 10 years ago, buying a camera for a communications class she was taking and teaching herself along the way. The pictures of her friends tagging walls became the core of her undergraduate thesis, which she said earned her honors.
She spent two years after graduation as an assistant to Nicolas Serrano, a fashion photographer whose work she admired, doing studio work and traveling through the country to photograph landscapes.
The death of President Hugo Chávez in 2013, and the clashes that followed, spurred her to leave the studio and take to the streets, freelancing for local newspapers. The scenes she had once seen only at night with her friends and their graffiti were now evident during the day.
Most of her old friends had left the country by 2014, she said, joining the stream of exiles fleeing overseas. The country had become increasingly dangerous, and the conversations with people she encountered while taking pictures exposed that not only was the country out of control, people’s lives were too.
“People don’t seem to care if they are dead or alive because it has become such a common thing,” she said. “Life is fragile, and it’s not even your choice. Your life depends on a decision someone else makes for you.”
And perhaps nowhere is that feeling strongest among the young people she has encountered, who feel they have inherited a crisis not of their own making, where despite whatever they do — whether it is voting or protesting — nothing changes. She is worried for the future as the options for a peaceful resolution dwindle.
“I’ve seen these young people in a desperate scream, almost tortured about the fact that nothing seems to move anywhere,” she said. “That no matter what they do or how much they risk, this reality is imposed on them. People here don’t have time to keep waiting — they are waiting for something to happen so that they can live again.”
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