In 2005, Eli Hobin, an eight-year old boy from Toronto, Canada, photographed the Amazonian headwaters from the south of Peru to the Brazilian border in the north during a month long voyage of more than four thousand kilometers.
Traveling from village to village by raft, canoe and seasonal riverboats, Eli experienced and documented the diversity and fragile beauty of human activity in the rapidly changing ecosystem along Peru’s Rio Urubamba, Rio Ucayali and Rio Amazonas. Environmental portraits, taken with a child's unique perspective and a precocious eye for context and composition, these images explore a land and a people in transition. Rather than depict the more visceral images of poverty and environmental destruction directly, Eli’s black and white photographs reveal what he believes to be the only hope for sustainable solutions to these issues; the determination, resilience and strength of “cultura del rio”, an enduring bond between an ancient people and the waters that determine the cycle of their lives.
After two months of preparation, Eli opened “Reciprocity”, his first solo gallery exhibition on June 21, 2005. Twenty-seven black and white “Giclée” fine art prints, exhibited at the Gibsone Jessop Gallery in Toronto’s Distillery District.
Eli often returns to Peru and continues to work as a visual storyteller in the isolated highland communities of the Andes. He loves fly fishing, skiing, grossing people out by eating Piranha eyes and can cook Thirty Minute Brownies in only twenty minutes.
RECIPROCITY
one boy two shores three rivers
