Juan Pablo Marin
Colombia
Artist and SMArtArtist's Career
Pictures to raise
Awareness on the challenges
Facing Mountain Regions
Waiting for Millions of years
Juan Pablo Marìn calls them the fruit of the mountains: the crystals that inspire him as a photographer among the steep cliffs of Göschenen in Uri’s raw uplands. It took these marvels millions of years of gestation, deep in the earth, before they were ready for explorers to find them.
Marìn’s portraits of crystal seekers, those who live on the mountain and in the mountain, who make their living from the mountain but above all who live with the mountain, tell of their passion and love for its stones, of their awe and respect for nature. Marìn’s pictures offer a glimpse of these people, and of their landscape, refracted through the crystals they search for. His is a condensation of the metaphorical, of the mighty poetry of time and decay, of the mountains’ effect on body and spirit.
And indeed, born in 1983 in Columbia and raised 1400 meters above sea level in the town of Armenia, surrounded by the Andes, Juan Pablo Marìn sees himself as a montañero, a man of the mountains.