Faces of Barranquilla: A City in Portraits

A portrait campaign for the city of Barranquilla — athletes, dancers, a palenquera and a carnival devil, a study of a Colombian city through the faces of its people.

How do you photograph a city? Not with its buildings, I think, but with its people. This portrait campaign for Barranquilla, Colombia's great Caribbean city, sets out to capture the place through the faces of those who make it: athletes, carnival dancers, a palenquera balancing her bowl of fruit, a red-horned carnival devil. It is a city told as a series of portraits.

Barranquilla contains multitudes, sport and folklore, tradition and youth, and the point of the project was to hold all of it in one set of faces.

One city, many worlds

The range is the message. A teenage rugby player braced for a tackle. A baseball pitcher mid-windup under a hot sky. Carnival dancers glowing in pink studio light. The palenquera, that iconic Colombian figure, in immaculate white with fruit balanced on her head. A costumed devil from the carnival, horned and defiant. Side by side, they say something no single portrait could: this is a city of athletes and artists, of the modern and the ancestral, all at once.

It is a companion piece to my street-level Carnaval de Barranquilla essay. That one lived in the crowd and the parade; this one pulls individuals out and lets each stand for a piece of the city.

Studio control, human warmth

Many of these were made with controlled, dramatic lighting rather than available light, a red field behind the carnival devil, warm gold behind the palenquera, hard studio colour on the dancers. That deliberate lighting gives the portraits a poster-like power and lets each subject's costume and character dominate the frame. The craft is invisible; the person is everything.

Bringing that level of portrait control to a civic campaign is what makes it feel premium rather than promotional. A city deserves to be photographed with the same care you would give a magazine cover.

“You do not photograph a city with its skyline. You photograph it with its faces.”

Sport and folklore in one frame

What I love about Barranquilla is that it refuses to choose between its identities. The same city that produces serious athletes throws one of the greatest folk carnivals on Earth. Putting a rugby player next to a carnival devil is not a contradiction here; it is an accurate portrait. That coexistence of the athletic and the ancestral is the real subject.

It connects to my fascination with fandom and identity elsewhere, from the painted Panthers fans of Miami to the costumes of carnival: people declaring who they are through how they present themselves.

A portrait of a place

City and destination branding is some of the most meaningful commercial work a photographer can do, because it shapes how a place sees itself and how the world sees it. Done with real portraiture rather than stock cheerfulness, it can be genuinely moving.

These are some of the faces of Barranquilla: the athletes, the dancers, the palenquera and the devil, a Caribbean city told one portrait at a time.