travling photography

Photo � Delphine Blast | All Rights Reserved And for a total change away from Asia, I'm featuring photography out of South America,; a continent I've visited a number of times but neglected on this blog. A French photographer, Delphine Blast was on a two month journey in Bolivia, and met dozens of cholitas;  Aymara and Quechua women in layered skirts and shawls, with the distinctive bowler hats atop their heads, and learned of the social and racial discrimination they had faced for as long as anyone could remember. She decided then to produce a series of portraits in a gallery titled The Cholitas Project to feature these women's identity affirmations and to reflect the social changes in the country following the 2005 election of Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president. A possibly apocryphal tale about the bowler hats worn by these indigenous women is that in the late 1800s, two brothers in Manchester were manufacturing a line of bowler hats, and plann...