July 2001, Ivory Coast. Joseph, aged 4, stood on the other side of the wall and watched him walk up the steps like an old man. For the HIV-positive child, as for anyone else, these steps would inexorably lead to death. That was the first of Alvaro’s non-returns.
Having pulled himself out of a coma that he does not want to talk about, but which pressed him to seek his survival instinct in distant places, he stepped into the other dimension, the dimension of pain, of thinking of others before anything else – the dimension of reality.
Alvaro was lucky: he was a photographer for Paris-Match, which provided him with a forum and with funds, enabling him to decide what he wanted to show, where he wanted to go…
Along came September 11, with the suffering, the ensuing conflicts. Increasingly, Paris-Match reverted to being a real news weekly, covering Pakistan, Afghanistan, Argentina’s economic crisis… Alvaro was always on the move, eager to show, sometimes also eager to run away…

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The photojournalistic work he is presenting in this exhibition, which was set up by Paris-Match, is a bit disjointed, just like the pace of news; it is the result of corporate decisions to accept or to reject a photographer's request to travel to a given news spot.

The photos also give us a glimpse into a world which is foreign to most of us, but has become familiar to Alvaro, probably because the experience enables him to reconstruct himself. I am confident he will never stop exploring that world.

Caroline Mangez, Fort Riley, Kansas, July 2003.

Alvaro Canovas

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