OMO Change
Omo Change tells and to document, the big investments from European and Chinese countries in the Omo Valley, one of the most important place for its peculiar biodiversity despite the desert or semi-desert ambient. In fact, this area has been declared as UNESCO Human Heritage site in the 1980. A big dam construction, foreign investments for brand new cotton farms, are changing dramatically both the naturalistic ambient and the local population daily life. Moreover, there is a big government project to build a sugar factories carrying off more than 200,000 hectares to the tribes with a consequent reshaping of the territorial borders and social. The Omo Valley is seeing its biggest contradiction, the one that has been generated by the investments of the so called development. The Omo Valley risks of becoming a pool of resources for the rest of the world but not for its own population.
Fausto Podavini
Fausto Podavini was born in Rome, where he currently lives and works. He began his photographic journey first as an assistant and studio photographer, to approach gradually to photo-reportage. Podavini has also been part of MIFAV Tor Vergata University, where got to know and been in contact with many photographers. After abandoning studio photography to devote himself exclusively to reportage, he then embarked himself as a freelance, working with various non-profit organization for the realization of reports in Italy, Peru, Kenya and Ethiopia, where he currently is pursuing some personal photo projects. In 2009 he began a collaboration with the Collective WSP, joined permanently in 2010, where, in addition to work as a photographer in collective projects, he works as a professor of Photojournalism. In addition to his various reports in Africa, South America and India, Podavini has carried out important work on the Italian territory such as a report on sport for disabled, a report in a juvenile prison and a work on Alzheimer's disease, with whom he won the Daily Life section of the World Press Photo 2013. His works have won international awards such as The World Press Photo in 2013 and 2018, Il Poy in 2016 and 2018, Sony, Yves Rocher Grant and have been published in the most important international magazines such as 6Mois, LeVie / LeMonde, GEO ES, Stern, Internzainale, Donna Moderna, National Geographic, Days Japan and has exhibited in major cities such as New York, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Rome.
