João Canziani was born in Lima, Peru. He spent his youth avoiding team sports and drawing elaborate blueprints for things like minivans that turned into submarines. João found the perfect amalgam of art and engineering when he inherited his father’s old Pentax. At the age of 15, the family moved to Vancouver, and João used his camera to document the strange new landscape and get close to girls. After completing a degree in Psychology in Canada, he studied photography at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, executing slick, highly-lit fashion shoots. But it was his intensely personal images he shot in Lima that first attracted magazines such as the Fader and Travel & Leisure to his work, earning João recognition as one of PDN’s 30 in 2005.
Of this work, Canadian Cafe Bar, he writes: ‘For a few Peruvian “soles” the girls of Canadian Café Bar will talk to you, flirt with you, make you feel special. This is how it works: You buy them a drink and they’ll sit with you. Buy them a few and they’ll spend the whole night with you. But they won’t sleep with you, although some men have tried, and probably gotten away with it.
‘I met one of the girls after stumbling upon a “sexy calendar” photo shoot she was posing for at a beach in Lima. I asked her if I could shoot her sometime. She said, sure. I naively thought she would be eager to do it. Instead it took a bit of negotiating. I had to pay her. She took it seriously though, and offered to do whatever I wanted while we were together.
‘She worked at the bar for the same reason she posed for me, to pay for her school. Most of these girls didn’t do it for pleasure, but out of necessity: To survive in the big city after moving here from the Amazon, for instance; or to feed a child out of wedlock. These women came from humble origins, unlike the girls I grew up with before I moved away.
‘I left Lima, Peru when I was barely a teenager. My latent curiosity for the opposite sex to be satisfied somewhere new. These portraits are an attempt to revisit this curiosity. I too wanted to see how it felt to be in the company of these women, by making a connection through the act of photography. I discovered this brought me closer to a place I call my home’.
This work will be exhibited at La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa in September, 2011.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
when will photography blogs/websites/magazines realise that every time they publish or promote a ’story’ showing yet more naked girls in motel rooms it casts the editor of that photography blog/website/magazine in a certain lazy light. please put aside your need for hits and views and being part of what everyone else is showcasing and instead put in a bit more effort to look for original work that our eyes won’t have seen before. please consider more photography that doesn’t conform to trends, from photographers who you’ve never heard of.
this is not aimed at you directly Feature Shoot, and I have nothing against João Canziani and his work but it is so disappointing and disheartening that I see these images almost everywhere I look. and yes I am a photographer. I hope if this comment is not published you will at least consider what is being suggested.
rant over…
Anon Male,
First of all, thanks for your comment/rant. I really appreciate the feedback and negative feedback is so much more interesting than the positive. I may not always agree with what you have to say, but I enjoy hearing from people who have ideas on how to make the site more compelling.
Feature Shoot shows work by many different types of photographers, from students to professionals at the top of their game. I think that’s what makes the site interesting.
I think this work by Joao is really beautiful and the statement really heartfelt, and that’s the sole reason why I chose to feature it on the site. Not because I thought it was going to be popular and get lots of traffic, not because I had nothing else to run that day, and not because I’m lazy and just ripped it off another photography blog.
So it’s been featured elsewhere, so what? I don’t really care about that. My readers come from all over the world and not everyone is looking at the same blogs. Just because LPV featured it a few days ago, does that mean it should be off limits to everyone else? Of course not. The work is quality and that’s why it is so popular.
I actually had a conversation with Bryan, of the amazing LPV Magazine, not long ago in which we discussed this very topic. We both agreed that it’s thrilling to come across a photographer that no one else has written about or featured and give that person exposure to a wider audience. Some of us will only run photographers that have not appeared elsewhere. I pay a little attention to where it has been seen before, but that’s usually not the deciding factor on whether or not I run the piece. And truthfully, I had never seen this work before Joao sent it to me.
Lastly, I want to add that if you are going to write about another photographers work in a negative light, then you should be prepared to back that shit up. That means posting your comment under your real name and including a link to your work so that we might see what truly “original” photography looks like. I will no longer post comments from anonymous users on this blog.