Maria Portaluppi

Documentary Photographer
     
Once upon a time
Location: Guayaquil, Ecuador
Nationality: Ecuadorean
Biography: My career began when I decided to study cinematography, in 2004, this is how photography became my tool of work as a Director of Photography. A few years later I decided to quit the audiovisual area, and focused on photography doing a Master in... MORE
Public Story
Once upon a time
Copyright Maria Portaluppi 2024
Date of Work Oct 2015 - Apr 2018
Updated Nov 2019
Topics Animals, Conservation, Documentary, Education, Essays, Latin America, Photography, Spotlight

The first time I saw a stuffed animal was in a small museum in a town near Quito, in a cold, white place with very weak light. I still have the memory of shivering when I looked into the eyes of an eagle with open wings about to fly, imposing and at the same time totally inert. Twenty years have passed since that first encounter and I still have that feeling entering into a natural history museum, with different scenarios, more cozy, more real than the first one but totally fantastic and surreal, as if they were telling me a bed time story through murals and dead animals. These types of museums show us places where a six-year-old girl has not been and has only seen on television or children's books’ stories like a lioness with her mother instinct taking care of her puppies. In this story our relationship with these institutions is shown and through their sets and animals they educate us, because television is distant, the museum is not, we see animals that died in zoos, circuses, and in the hands of hunters, found by peasants, but that is not a story that is not told to us.

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