Luciano Riquelme

When I was a little boy I used to steal the family camera and take photos of buses passing by, people walking around outside my house, trees, and everything I could reach in those few minutes before someone found me. I had to put the camera in the exact same drawer where it was always kept so no one would ever know I took it in the first place. My parents used to reveal the film and wonder who took those weird pictures and I used to look away so they wouldn’t know it was me.

I was born in Santiago in 1984, at the end of the dictatorship in Chile. After a couple of years prowling in a journalism career, I decided to study photography at Arcos Institute in Santiago and I specialized in journalistic photography, which definitely paid off in my years working at the most important newspaper in Chile: El Mercurio.

Thanks to journalistic photography I could see a little bit of different areas and I realized my passion was actually the people itself: their faces, their day to day life. Today, when I travel I aspire not to see new places, but cultures, to share with the people and spend time with them and get to know them enough to build trust between us.

​After one year living in The Middle East, I´m currently living in the city of Rotterdam, in The Netherlands, where I´m working as a Freelance photographer and videographer.