Theo De Gueltzl

I grew up in Paris until I left for the first time in 2011 to go study Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in London. I am now 25 years old and have a lot of trouble defining what would “living somewhere” means for me. I like to think that my home is moving along with me, wherever I go. After my studies I only wanted to escape the city and feel closer from my own nature. I started an adventure driving from Los Angeles in April 2015, wanting to go south. I arrived in Colombia a year and a half after. I have been exploring Colombia since then working on various projects in South America.

I see Photography as an intuitive and direct way to express myself. It is first a passion, a language, something part of my quotidian life. Photographs allow me to tell a story without words, to express my emotions without explanation, to create a second layer of reality. Through applying an aesthetic to reality I try to demonstrate my vision on this world. 
While taking photos, I like being close to the subject, often almost wishing to become transparent, invisible. My hope is to be able to invest more time into each of my project, in order to become an element rather than an intruder of the subject that I choose. Empathy plays a big role in my approach to a subject matter. I stay connected with a place and its people, believing and following my intuition, to then create both a personal and universal response that aims to raise awareness on important issues. 
 
In this process I find myself mostly working on the same subject. I am drawn to a particular kind of people and places. Cultures that goes unnoticed. People who one could call outsiders. Outsiders of the society that I grew up in, the one we sometimes call “western”. My fascination lays with the people who live at the margin of Modern Society, who are threatened to be swallowed up by it, yet continue to follow their own way of life, whether with or against their will. To me they are proposing different ways of seeing the world, while respectfully using nature’s resources to live a peaceful and happy life. In my opinion this diversity of cultures needs to be maintained, I feel strongly opposed to the normalisation and assimilation of cultures to one consistent modern society. Neither do I believe in the term civilised as something that is superior to any other type of society, clan or family of this world. Like Hannah Arendt wrote in her publication ‘There is only one human right’, 1949: “No one has noticed that the human race, long seen as a ‚family of nations, has reached a stadium in which everyone who was excluded from this closed political community, was suddenly excluded from the whole ‚family of nations”.