Rust and Sweat

• Photographer
  Mauro De Bettio
• Prizes
  Gold in Editorial/Photo Essay

Char Kaliganj, slum and home to one of the largest shipyards in Asia. The noise is incredibly loud. Looks like time is marked by thousands of hammers banging incessantly against the bodies of these huge ships to remove the rust. Rusty, old supertanker ships come to die in this place when their lives as vessels on the ocean expire. The age of labourers ranges from 8 to 80 and they all work together. The work is hard, crude, dirty and dangerous but it gives thousands of them employment and wages to feed their families.

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".