Pedro Farias-Nardi-Cold Trade

Pedro Farias Nardi 

El Otro & Cold Trade

February 7 - March 3, 2013

Pedro Farias-Nardi's El Otro is a series of portraits of undocumented Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic. In collaboration with the Immigration Department, the portraits were taken when the the Jesuit Refugee and Migrant Service (JRMS) started an ID campaign. "My reason for these re-presentations is to call attention to the plight of these workers who are ignored by the Dominican population, but are an important segment of our economy. I cooperated with the JRMS for almost two years, documenting the life of the migrants in the region."

In a related series, Cold Trade, Farias-Nardi documents the ice-making trade by Haitian migrant workers on the border of Dominican Republic and Haiti. "That the Haitians have to cross a border to buy ice strikes me as a symbol of how bad things are in the neighbor country, because the  technology is simple: electricity, a refrigerator, and water."

Pedro Farias-Nardi was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 1957 and started photography at the early age of seven. Focusing on long-term photographic projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, Farias-Nardi has extensively documented the lives of economically and socially marginal people. He holds degrees in anthropology from the City University of New York and the University of Florida, Gainesville, and studied photography and visual anthropology at the International Center for Photography, the University of Southern California, and with photojournalist Antonin Kratochvil. He currently lives in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.