Sharjah24: “If justice only punishes and never heals, is it truly justice at all?” asked Venezuelan visual storyteller Ana Maria Arevalo Gosen during her presentation titled “Eternal Days: How Access and Trust Shaped My Work in Latin American Prisons” on the concluding day of the Xposure International Photography Festival at Aljada, Sharjah on Wednesday.
Ana, who specialises in photojournalism, focusing on women's rights, social justice, and environmental issues, narrated her experience documenting incarcerated women in Latin America, uncovering for a spellbound audience their struggles, resilience, and humanity. The powerful storytelling and compelling photographs from her long-term project, Eternal Days, gave intimate and rare insights into women’s lives in prisons across Venezuela, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
Born in Caracas, Ana had migrated to Europe in 2009 after she almost lost her life in three separate incidents – a protest, a robbery and a homicide attempt. When she returned in 2017, discovering photography in between, she heard from a friend about Venezuela’s “pre-trial detention centres, spaces originally designed to keep people for 45 days, but now holding them indefinitely, in inhuman conditions and illegal limbo”.
“Gaining access wasn’t easy,” she remembered and the overcrowded centre in Valencia where five cells meant for 100 detainees had greater numbers of women sharing overflowing toilets, bathrooms with cardboard walls and a small window that brought faint fresh air. The “strawberries” or the ones who paid more had access to a bed, TV and small kitchen, she pointed out.
“The camera itself felt like an imposition,” Ana said, explaining how she won their trust by sharing their space and singing to them. The women, many of whom had no lawyers or any idea when they would be released, were suspected of being involved in gangs or drug trafficking. “I gained their trust and our bond deepened. I witnessed their resilience even in the bleakest of spaces,” Ana noted.
The saddest part was the fact that most of the women detainees were mothers, and had to let go of their children when they turned five, often to their families or to state shelters. The photographs depicted prison lives where the young mothers tended to their children as they played the “indefinite waiting game”.
The women detainees she visited in El Salvador and Guatemala were also rounded up for gang affiliations and drug trade; Ana shared pictures of police raiding poppy fields in Guatemala where families could legally grow poppies.
According to Ana, what was most striking about the women was that they still took care of themselves, styled their hair or learnt classical music, telling the world that “my body is still mine”. Creation is a form of survival, not resistance for these women, said the Venezuelan photographer.
“What does it mean to imprison women who were only trying to survive? What happens after they leave? Can they truly rebuild their lives? And what does this broken system say about the societies we are creating today?” Ana posed these questions, adding that of the 81,000 people detained in El Salvador’s mass imprisonment campaign only 7,000 have been released. She concluded her talk by saying that “an unfair system does not only harm those incarcerated, it weakens the fabric of society itself, and in the end, we all pay the price”.
Organised by the Sharjah Government Media Bureau (SGMB), Xposure 2025 came to a close on February 26.
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