Felipe Paiva is a photojournalist from Brazil currently based in Paris, France. He is a post graduate in cinema and photojournalism and has been working on field covering countries such as France, Brazil, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Russia, including frontline work.
Q. How do you find a not obvious story to document? Any advice to new photojournalists?
To any new person, in any field, I would recommend doing a bit of the obvious. For the sole reason of getting familiar to the operations involved in the work. To find a non-obvious story I would say it is a good thing to get an obvious story and from that, extract something more personal. Maybe a character on that story has something that is not really related to the story but it is super interesting or of human value.
One example is something I did in Ukraine. I went there to do work related to the conflict but I ended up meeting a gymnastic athlete from Donetsk. She took me to their training gym and I could have gone after her persona story. A young girl that dreams of going into the Olympics. Donetsk is known for having good athletes but nowadays is not part of any recognized country. So, its citizens train very hard, with old equipment, in a region that has seen its economy devastated by the ongoing conflict. Unfortunately, I couldn’t because of the short time I had in the whole country.
I hope that helps a bit. Other than that, go and do lots of stories, even if they won’t be published or if they are very local and “small”
https://www.felipepaivaimg.com/
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