The eyes of the world on the award-winning work of a Tec professor

By revealing the story of a woman through photography, Professor Henry Moncrieff Zabaleta from the Tec’s Mexico City campus has won the international Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology.

The work presented by Moncrieff Zabaleta portrays the beauty of Estrella, a 60-year-old indigenous Venezuelan woman who worked collecting copper and aluminum in a garbage dump in Ciudad Guayana.

“I was also able to reinterpret my photographic eye with a more mature sociological vision That’s how I explored Chávez’s demand to construct a national sovereignty, and used the notes in my notebook to reconstruct the backstage of Estrella’s portrait for the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize.

“Professionally, this international award encourages me to continue as an ethnographer linked to visual sociology. Today I consider myself a producer of ‘photographic data’ on the ground,” he explained.

“I try to communicate this experience to my Tec students: that not all data is oral, but that it can also be visual,” he added.

Henry Moncrieff was born in Venezuela, where he met Estrella. Just like the participants of ‘Miss Universe’ which the South American country is noted for producing, this woman of Warao descent also has a beauty that should be recognized.

“I am a Venezuelan who has been living in Mexico for a few years and I currently work as a sociologist in this country that has received me.

“I had training as an anthropologist/photographer in Venezuela and France, but I always worked within the framework of empirical sociology, an experience that resulted in photographic essays of field work in inhospitable places,” he added.

The professor’s plans include documenting Mexico City and its young people through his images.

“My doctoral dissertation will be on the belongings of young people residing in the marginalized periphery of Mexico City. For this ongoing research I have decided upon a “visual mode” in dialog with a “textual mode” (observations and interview transcripts).

“I have been doing an exploration of the sensations of living in poverty-stricken areas of Mexico, trying to capture these experiences in images and translate them in terms of visual sociology,” he said.

The Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology is intended to encourage students to study social phenomena.

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