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What Blossoms Beneath the Earth
Yris Pablo
Series description
What Blossoms Beneath the Earth is a documentary and symbolic photographic project that focuses on the LGBTIQ+ community living in the mining regions of southern Venezuela. The photographer explains that against this deeply masculine backdrop, ‘where the harshness of labour and territorial control impose silence, this project explores identity, resistance, and visibility’. Through interventions on images, portraits and symbolic objects, the work transforms documentary photography into a gesture, where gold and flowers become symbols of dignity, identity and rebirth, emerging from the violence and rigidity of the territory.
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A portrait set against a landscape scarred by mining. Jhon survived a physical attack that was motivated by his sexual orientation; an act of violence that sent him to hospital and left marks on both his body and his memory.
© Yris Pablo, Venezuela, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Documentary Projects, 2026 Sony World Photography Awards
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The bare torso of a man in a mining environment, his body strong, muscular, and marked by physical exertion. This image represents the masculinity imposed in mining territories, with the body as a productive force and an instrument of work and survival. In this environment, the idea of the ‘strong man’ is the norm.
© Yris Pablo, Venezuela, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Documentary Projects, 2026 Sony World Photography Awards
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A portrait of a young man from the mining community of El Callao.
© Yris Pablo, Venezuela, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Documentary Projects, 2026 Sony World Photography Awards
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The photographer explains that the exclusion of the subject's face shifts identity away from the individual and onto the body, which becomes an exposed and vulnerable territory, but also a space of affirmation. ‘In a context marked by violence and precarity, the dissident body emerges as an act of visibility and resistance, challenging gender norms and the imposed codes of masculinity.’
© Yris Pablo, Venezuela, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Documentary Projects, 2026 Sony World Photography Awards
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A portrait and an image of the land merge through the intervention of gold leaf. ‘The covered face enters into a dialogue with the cracks in the ground: both share fractures, both are symbolically repaired, turning damage into a space of resistance and memory.’
© Yris Pablo, Venezuela, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Documentary Projects, 2026 Sony World Photography Awards
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A portrait of a young person wearing a long blue dress, posing against a pink fabric backdrop. The photographer explains that partially covering their face introduces a tension between visibility and protection, while the choice of clothing challenges the gender norms associated with this region.
© Yris Pablo, Venezuela, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Documentary Projects, 2026 Sony World Photography Awards
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A portrait of a male body in which the absence of the face ‘points to forced anonymity and to the strategies of concealment that shape sexual dissidence in the mining territories of southern Venezuela. The floral intervention, alien to the harsh, extractive imagery of the environment, functions as a symbol of life, desire, transformation and identity.’
© Yris Pablo, Venezuela, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Documentary Projects, 2026 Sony World Photography Awards