Travel, Landscape and Wildlife Photographer Chiara Felmini is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the series ‘STIGMA’. To see Chiara’s body of work, click on any image.

STIGMA

A life on the cross.

In the Bhavnagar area (Gujarat region – India) I had the opportunity to enter small factories or foundries, where the iron planks coming from the demolition of ships are cut, melted and transformed into rods used in reinforced concrete; we therefore start from the demolition of laid up ships to arrive at an indispensable product for the construction of new buildings. Entering these places was a punch in the stomach. There is no other way to express it. You see lives on the cross. You are surrounded by fire, crosses and sweat, men who move silently because everything is covered by the deafening noise of the ovens, fans and fatigue. Being born, growing up and dying with no escape is a life on the cross, a sentence that men and children often have to undergo in these parts. Life is stigmatized, stopped, trapped in an inhuman condition, for about 1 dollar a day, for all the days that come in these people’s lives. It is a cliché to say that these men have looks full of dignity and are willing to smile, but at least in part it is the truth. It is equally true that going through this hell I could not get rid of the recurrence of cross images from my eyes, as if to remind me of the leitmotif of these existences: in each shot it was as if the crosses created by lights, shadows and objects reminded me a narrative leitmotif. Shot after shot I tried to portray men, their looks, their effort, their sweat and their cross, so that someone else could see them as I saw them: men with a life on the cross.