UNESCO Paris – Higher Than Fear
In what I can only describe as a masterclass in timely content creation, I’m delighted to share that last June I was invited to speak on a panel at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. Which is not a sentence I had particularly anticipated writing when I first travelled to Bolivia with a bag of cameras.
Yes, June 2025. Twelve months ago. YSo maybe we think of this as an anniversary post.
The event, titled Higher Than Fear, was held as part of Latin America and the Caribbean Week at UNESCO, and brought together the story of the Cholitas Escaladoras and the wider conversation around indigenous women’s rights, gender equality, and glacier preservation. My work from the project was exhibited at the headquarters alongside the event, which still feels faintly surreal to type.
The panel was anchored by Lita González, Bolivian mountain guide and founder of the Cholitas Escaladoras collective, whose presence in that auditorium said rather more than any of the rest of us managed. Lita has summited Sajama, Illimani, Parinacota, and Aconcagua, the highest peak outside Asia, doing so in traditional pollera dress and using a shawl in place of a backpack. She has also, less dramatically but arguably more significantly, spent years navigating the social and institutional barriers that told her and women like her that none of that was available to them. Hearing her speak directly to an audience of UN members and diplomats in the room where those conversations are supposed to happen was something else entirely.
What struck me most, sitting there, was the distance the project had travelled since I first shot it. These images started as a personal project, a visual response to something I found extraordinary and wanted to understand better. They’ve since appeared in The Guardian, been exhibited internationally, and now ended up here. Photography at its best does that, it creates a thread between a remote valley in Bolivia and a room full of people in Paris who might otherwise never encounter that story. You just have to hope you’ve done it justice.
What made the day personally meaningful, beyond the scale of the occasion, was being reunited with Ana Lia. We’d created the project together years earlier, alongside her mother Dora and the other climbers, and there’s a particular kind of feeling that comes from building something with people, losing touch with the day-to-day of their lives, and then finding yourself in the same room again years later in a place neither of you could have predicted. To see her speaking with that kind of authority, in that kind of room, felt like a quiet full stop on something. Or perhaps more accurately, a comma.
The Cholitas don’t need a photographer to validate what they’ve built. But if the images have helped carry the story further than it might otherwise have reached, that’s enough.
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/pollera-aconcagua-cholitas-escaladoras-brought-their-story-unesco
