Felipe Romero Beltrán, winner of Fundación MAPFRE's KBr photography award

Felipe Romero Beltrán is the winner of the second edition of the KBr Photo Award for his Bravo project, which reflects life on the Mexican border with the US. The jury of this edition highlighted his poetic approach to documentary photography, as well as his search for a deep visual reflection on places or situations of tension and conflict.

The ongoing project has the Bravo river as its protagonist and the importance it has due to its dual status: it is a river and a border at the same time.

The work, which takes place in the approach to the territory immediately before the border, from Monterrey to the river that marks the border, presents the migratory conflict of this border, which is not only local, but crosses the entire center and south of the continent. Hundreds of thousands of people cross Central America from their countries of origin (Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, with the highest statistics) to reach Mexico and try to cross the river to the United States. Bravo, which is an ongoing project, insists on the implications and relationships that the photographic document establishes with the reality it approximates. This is why this long-term project tries to build, from a captured image, a displaced view of the generalized story, emphasizing the territory of the river, as well as the inhabitants, who also constitute the border .

The images emphasize not only the territory, but also its inhabitants, who also constitute a border, and the people who wait to cross it, a fact that can last for months or even years.

In addition to the financial endowment, the recognition includes the production and organization of an exhibition at the KBr Fundación MAPFRE center (Barcelona) and at the Fundación headquarters in Madrid, which will show the result of the project and the edition of a book.

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Bogotá, 1992) is a photographer and visual artist. Aware of the tension in contemporary practices, Romero Beltrán's images are located at the limits of documentary photographic logic.

His work proposes a historical and social reading and deals with case studies that investigate the possible relationships between the document and society. Romero Beltrán is interested in territories that go through or have gone through conflict processes and function as devices of visual reflection.

His practice takes elements close to the fields of politics and social history, deeply influenced by the photographic tradition. He is currently developing a doctoral program at the Complutense University of Madrid and at the same time carries out photographic projects in Colombia, Spain and Mexico.