Hard time
Behind the wire: Alejandro Cegarra in El Rodeo II.
On the outskirts of Caracas lies a prison known as El Rodeo II. The prison caught the public’s eye in 2011 when a shootout between two gangs in the prison resulted in the deaths of twenty-five people. Despite the violence within the prison, emerging and award-winning photographer, Alejandro Cegarra, travelled to the prison in 2014 to capture the lives of the prisoners and their stories. “I felt sorry for them. I'm addicted to life. I love to live. To think about losing part of your life inside a jail for making a bad decision was a little bit sad,” he says.
El Rodeo II isn’t just a prison for Venezuelan criminals though. It is often used to imprison many foreign criminals or foreigners accused of crimes such as U.S. filmmaker Tim Tracy who was imprisoned in El Rodeo II after being accused of espionage in Venezuela until he was later released. “Most of the prisoners are foreigners and they miss everything about their country. Once I asked an Italian guy what he was going do when he gets out of jail and he said, ‘It sounds silly, but I want to eat pasta. Eight years without eating Italian pasta is a lot for an Italian guy’,” says Cegarra.
As a photographer who always wishes to test his limits, choosing to document the lives of the inmates certainly stretched Cegarra personally and improved his photographic eye for all that is human.
About Alejandro Cegarra
Alejandro Cegarra was born in 1989, in Caracas, Venezuela, a city he still calls home. He began studying photography four years ago via the Roberto Mata Taller de Fortografia (Roberto Mata Photography Workshop), while simultaneosly studying Publicity at Alejandro de Humboldt University.
A year after working with Creative Army, a local advertising agency, he decided to pursue photography full time. In 2012, he began filling in for other photographers at Venezuela's largest newspaper, Ultimas Noticias. He was also shooting for two other newspapers at the time - Ciudad Caracas and 2001. In November 2013, he started working as a stringer for Associated Press.
In early 2014, he was selected to exhibit in the PhotoEspaña Festival as well as being chosen by the Magnum Photo Agency as part of the 30 Under 30 contest, where he won the Audience Award.
His series, The Other Side of the Tower of David, won 3rd place in the Sony World Photography Awards in the ‘Contemporary Issues’ category. Also in 2014, he was selected as finalist in burn magazine's Emerging Photography Fund, won the Ian Parry scholarship and was selected as the winner of the Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award for 2014.