The decision to focus on youth grew out of an earlier project, Nosotras, which celebrated the women of Venezuela and “how hard they worked to keep their families afloat”, Silvana says. Returning to Venezuela afterwards, she found herself thinking about beach days with friends as a child, and the realisation that the country’s youth – the generation most affected by the crisis – were also its future. “When I had to leave, it was the biggest heartbreak of my life, having to leave my family, my friends and a place that I love deeply,” she says. Photographing young people in Venezuela became, in her words, “the most genuine way for me to feel like I never left.”
The project’s early years unfolded in Sucre, a state where Silvana spent long days connecting with new people. “Every place slowly became familiar through the people I met. The images would naturally develop throughout the day, as I moved through the spaces and conversations around me.“ As the book came together, fashion crept further into that process too, bringing in costume, styling and bigger crews into some of the imagery. “I wouldn’t call it fashion photography,” she clarifies, “but fashion becomes a vehicle to explore the narrative.”
There are two photographs that have particularly stayed with Silvana. The first breaks her own rule that the project must stay entirely inside Venezuela: a portrait taken in Mexico City, during a commission photographing refugees, of a Venezuelan girl having her hair done by her mother. “I wasn’t too sure about including the image at first,” she admits, “but I kept thinking about the interaction I had with her and her mum. It highlighted the reality that so many Venezuelans have gone through. You could feel the heartbreak, the anger and the pain they carried.” The second image is of Hendry, a barber she met while driving in Caracas, photographed cutting his friend Omar’s hair on the terrace of her own grandmother’s building in Petare – a place she would often visit growing up. “Having Hendry cut Omar’s hair with such care, it resembled that brotherhood that I witnessed the days I spent with them. They took care of each other, and that is what it’s all about, companionship in hard times.” Hendry has since emigrated to Spain.
Nearly a decade on, Silvana doesn’t speak about the project as something finished so much as something she keeps revisiting. “I find myself always trying to come back to the images I first made for this project in 2016,” she says, recalling the slowness of working with a medium format camera for the first time – a quality she’s guarded carefully as the work has grown around her. As Venezuelan Youth becomes a book, that approach hasn’t changed. “The core of everything, in the end, is still to explore our identity as Venezuelans.”