Julio Etchart: Photojournalism and Documentary Projects
Julio Etchart is a documentary photographer and visual journalist who grew up in Uruguay and settled in Britain. His work runs across Latin America and the UK, with a long concentration on environmental and social subjects and on the Latin American community in London.
Julio Etchart
The biography on julioetchart.com states that he grew up in Uruguay and later settled in the UK, where he studied documentary photography at Newport Art College in Wales. He is represented in the UK by the agency Panos Pictures. The same page records a World Press Photo first prize in the environment category, after which he was commissioned to produce The Four Elements, a touring exhibition and catalogue on environmental issues sponsored by the European Union together with a group of NGOs.
His client list, as given on that page, is weighted towards aid and development organisations: Save the Children, Oxfam, CAFOD, War on Want, VSO and UNICEF, alongside the British Council, the European Union, University of the Arts London and the National University of Singapore.
Projects and books
The project sections on his site are arranged by subject rather than by country, which says something about how he works. Environment, Migration, Decolonisation, Campaigns, The Grenfell Legacy, Chile's 9/11, Imagining Orwell, The Playing Fields and an Archive Americas section covering earlier Latin American material.
Three books are listed on his site. The Forbidden Rainbow, published by Serpent's Tail in London, came out of a long project on the legacy of five hundred years of colonialism in the Americas. Toys was published by Mets and Schilt in Amsterdam in Dutch, German and English editions, distributed in the UK by Pluto Books and in the United States by the University of Missouri Press. Imagining Orwell in Three Continents, published by Just Press, follows George Orwell's path through Myanmar, Spain and Morocco.
Latin Americans in London
Etchart has photographed London's Latin American population for most of his career. A LatinoLife feature on his series Latins in London describes a selection spanning roughly thirty years, from Chilean exiles in the early 1980s onwards, taking in salsa classes in Islington and World Cup crowds in Trafalgar Square in 2010. The same piece says he first arrived in the UK from Uruguay in the 1970s.
That span is unusual. Most photographic coverage of a migrant community in a British city is made in bursts, when a news story or a funded project brings someone in for a few weeks. A record kept over three decades by a photographer who belongs to the community produces a different kind of document, one that shows change in ordinary settings rather than at moments of crisis.
Agencies, NGOs and documentary work
A career like this depends on where the commissions come from. Panos Pictures, the London agency that represents Etchart, was founded in 1986 and works on global social issues for international media and NGOs. Its agency page describes an archive of over 500,000 images and films documenting social, political and economic issues worldwide.
Charity and NGO commissioning has carried a large share of British documentary photography about the global south for decades, and it comes with its own pressures. The client needs pictures that support a campaign, while the photographer is working on a subject that may not resolve neatly. Other documentary photographers we cover are listed on the speakers index, with the full archive under talks.
Photo Forum is an independent journal and is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group. Nothing on this page comes from an interview conducted by us. The facts above are taken from the photographer's own site, his agency and the LatinoLife article, all linked in the text.