1st place
gold star award
Betina Samaia
brazil 
title
India - Memories of What I Have Never Seen
The letters used to come in silk paper, with blue-and-yellow scrollwork and with descriptions of decorated camels and elephants, passing by carrying mysterious passengers, wrapped in turbans and multicolored veils.
Almost 40 years later, I went to India to get some of these images from my past. Memories of what I had never lived.
I arrived in New Delhi at dawn. I went straight to the hotel. When the sun rose, I woke up in a world completely different from the bucolic universe my imagination built: "Welcome to India, madam", said the very thin driver of the rickshaw, who rode the winding streets of chaotic traffic.
Before the trip, I removed a filter from my Canon 5D to capture light radiation from what we see. And with the camera modified, I began my research, my personal investigation, into that intimate India, this imagined place.
I could finally find then in the small villages of Rajasthan; There, with the infrared filter, I began to capture scenes from my childhood dreams. Gradually, India that I photographed from the present was approaching India from my dream past. And the records — photographs of faded colors in shades of white, blue, and yellow — increasingly resembled the illustrations of Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism's foremost sacred scriptures. The magic acting on photography.
With series named Choreography of Chaos, Nocturnals, Amazon-The Green’s End, , India- Memories of What I Have Never Seen, Africa, Through the Mirror, Forests from The Imaginary among others, she has participated in several solo and group exhibits in Brazil, France and the United States.
Over the past decade, her photo essays have been featured in the Carrousel du Louvre (Paris), Espace des Arts Sans Frontières (Paris), La Quatrième Image (Paris), Magic Brésil (Paris), Le Magazyn (California), Nacional Historical Museum (Rio de Janeiro), Paraty em Foco (Rio de Janeiro), Museum of Image and Sound (Sao Paulo), Art 57 Gallery (Sao Paulo) and Valu Oria Gallery (Sao Paulo).
Betina is author of the books Amazon -The Green’s End (Edition Bessard, 2021), Multiverso – Quarentena Books 2 (IpsisPub, 2021), Out into the Night (Madalena Publisher, 2017), and Blue (Madalena Publisher, 2015).
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entry description
When I was a little girl, I used to wait for the postman at the gate. I was waiting for news from my parents, traveling around Asia.The letters used to come in silk paper, with blue-and-yellow scrollwork and with descriptions of decorated camels and elephants, passing by carrying mysterious passengers, wrapped in turbans and multicolored veils.
Almost 40 years later, I went to India to get some of these images from my past. Memories of what I had never lived.
I arrived in New Delhi at dawn. I went straight to the hotel. When the sun rose, I woke up in a world completely different from the bucolic universe my imagination built: "Welcome to India, madam", said the very thin driver of the rickshaw, who rode the winding streets of chaotic traffic.
Before the trip, I removed a filter from my Canon 5D to capture light radiation from what we see. And with the camera modified, I began my research, my personal investigation, into that intimate India, this imagined place.
I could finally find then in the small villages of Rajasthan; There, with the infrared filter, I began to capture scenes from my childhood dreams. Gradually, India that I photographed from the present was approaching India from my dream past. And the records — photographs of faded colors in shades of white, blue, and yellow — increasingly resembled the illustrations of Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism's foremost sacred scriptures. The magic acting on photography.
about the photographer
Betina Samaia is a Brazilian photographer. Born in São Paulo (SP), in 1964, she holds a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology from PUC-SP (Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo) and seeks to register images from the unconscious by traveling, freely moving between past and present, reality and imagination.With series named Choreography of Chaos, Nocturnals, Amazon-The Green’s End, , India- Memories of What I Have Never Seen, Africa, Through the Mirror, Forests from The Imaginary among others, she has participated in several solo and group exhibits in Brazil, France and the United States.
Over the past decade, her photo essays have been featured in the Carrousel du Louvre (Paris), Espace des Arts Sans Frontières (Paris), La Quatrième Image (Paris), Magic Brésil (Paris), Le Magazyn (California), Nacional Historical Museum (Rio de Janeiro), Paraty em Foco (Rio de Janeiro), Museum of Image and Sound (Sao Paulo), Art 57 Gallery (Sao Paulo) and Valu Oria Gallery (Sao Paulo).
Betina is author of the books Amazon -The Green’s End (Edition Bessard, 2021), Multiverso – Quarentena Books 2 (IpsisPub, 2021), Out into the Night (Madalena Publisher, 2017), and Blue (Madalena Publisher, 2015).
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