The series belongs to a long term project I followed over 3 years, and it was only after some time that the children depicted their lives as they really were without minding my presence. All of the images had the intention to portray them with dignity, to display them as the children they were despite their extremely difficult life conditions. They were the children of scavengers, and some of them had to work hard to earn their lives by scavenging for plastic bottles or scrap metals which could be sold and sometimes even scavenge for food. As the children that they were, they had the time to be happy, to play together, to work in teams, and to understand that the world that they lived in signified how the world was meant to be , as they didnt know that the children in many other places had very different lives. Sometimes, while looking through the garbage they would find magazines which showed families from very wealthy life status, and that would make them question themselves about the nature of their destiny.
Javier Sánchez-Monge Escardó is a Spanish photojournalist and philosopher born in 1965 in Madrid who has travelled and lived throughout different countries in an effort to document both humanitarian and environmental causes, specially dedicating himself in the past two years to the issue of climate change and to the man-made era of the anthropocene, among other issues of humanitarian nature, such as the Rohingya refugees. His works have been published on El País, La Vanguardia, El Confidencial, El Día, El Diario de Navarra, Periodistas en Español and through the Spanish agency Agencia EFE.
