Sweet Gold

• Photographer
  Mauro De Bettio
• Prizes
  Bronze in People/Culture

There are rare tribes in Nepal that have been haunting honey from Himalayan cliffs for centuries. Honey hunting is an ancestral tradition, still practiced today and passed down from generation to generation. This tradition not only holds symbolic meaning to the villagers, but it is also their main source of income. Wrapped in a tornado of angry giant bees, hanging with bare hands to a bamboo rope hundreds of meters high, these people risk their lives to collect the precious spring ‘red honey’, famous for its medicinal, aphrodisiac and hallucinogenic properties.

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".