The Wall of Silence

• Photographer
  Mauro De Bettio
• Prizes
  Silver in People/Family

At 22:39 on October 9, 1963, a 2 km long landslide of more than 270 million cubic meters of rock breaks off the mountain and slip down the valley, crashing inside the artificial lake. The water forms a 250m high wave that flies in the sky and then crashes down on Longarone, erasing it forever from the maps. Two thousand people are, now, one with the earth. From that day: silence, the greatest protagonist of this painful and infinite catastrophe. The silence that wounds the dead, the relatives, the survivors, the rescuers and all those who came after. Still, the silence of a family, mine.

Born and raised in a little village in the Italian Alps, now based in Barcelona, Mauro already felt from young age the desire to tell. He discovered that the camera was the right tool for him, the eye through which he could speak to the world. An instrument that began to walk by his side towards a long journey of discovery. “Although it is difficult to express, I think that the photograph represents my way of speaking and what I try to do through my language is to capture the sense of what I breathe and touch with my hands. Not only in appearance but also, and especially, in the essence".