Atlas Of Youth
ATLAS OF YOUTH is a portrait photography project conceived around hundreds of scouts from 83 different countries. They all lined up and came to do a photograph. In most cases it has been a very brief encounter of a few minutes, with the main purpose of creating a photographic record of their own uniforms.
These photographs are about the scouts' movement and its 50 million members worldwide. But they also address the issue of diversity within humankind, having the scouts as a mirror of that. This is relevant if we consider there are scouts basically everywhere, except in regions where its existence is still forbidden: Laos, Cuba or North Korea.
This series of portraits contains geographical bonds of the youth of our time, traces of where they grow up and build their own identities. But it is also an emotional map of cultural roots we all share.
Yet it’s important to understand the conditions in which all these images have been made. Every four years since 1920 young scouts coming from all continents join together in a Jamboree, a huge camp where they all cook, explore, play and dream together around their tents and sing around the campfire.
The last world scout jamboree was in 2015 and brought to Japan over 33.000 scouts from 155 different countries. During that event an improvised portrait stage is created. It's based upon natural light and a piece of black cloth borrowed from a German scout’s tent, used to neutralise the background and emphasize the physiognomy and individual elements.
Under tropical conditions of some 40º C plus 90% humidity, scouts in uniform start facing the camera. One by one, country by country. Austrians are the first, then the Brazilians, the Norwegians, the Indonesians, the Lebanese. Ideally, each country should have represented two young and two adult scouts, both male and female. As a photographer I had no previous knowledge or criteria of who exactly I was going to photograph. Nor did I know their names.
PROJECTO COMPLETO
Atlas Of Youth
A portrait photography project conceived around scouts from 83 countries. It’s an emotional map of geographical bonds and cultural roots. It represents a real political possibility of a diverse world.