PROOF
Warawar Wawa takes flight in a desert of salt, not sand, in Bolivia’s Uyuni salt flats.THE BACKSTORY
A PHOTOGRAPHER’S TAKE ON THE LITTLE PRINCE P OS E S
BIG QUESTIONS ABOUT CULTURE AND IDENTITY.ONE DAY ON A WHIM, photographer
River Claure googled “Bolivia.” That
image search yielded expected tropes
of his country: llamas, mountains, peo-
ple in traditional dress. Photographs
are often taken through an exoticizing
foreign gaze, as if Andean cultures are
frozen in time, Claure says. In reality,
the cultures are evolving and thriving
in today’s changing world.
Later, Claure thought more about
this—how the images affected his view
of himself, of his homeland—as he
read the English version of Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. Then
he began to question: What if one of
history’s most widely read children’s
books unfolded not in the Sahara
desert but in the Andes Mountains?
And what if the story’s main charac-
ter, rather than a blond prince, was a
dark-haired Andean child?
In The Little Prince, we see the world
through fresh eyes. It’s a story that cel-
ebrates childhood and play; Claureplayed with the story itself. He was
inspired by how Bolivian sociologist
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui encourages
people to reframe mixed cultural
identities by embracing ch’ixi. In this
concept—from Aymara, a language
spoken across the Andes—weavers
overlay strands of black and white
thread to create the illusion of a third
color, gray. Globalization has created
“new gradations of identity,” Claure
says. His visual lexicon juxtaposes
Andean symbols with global ones, and
asks viewers to see beyond the clichéd
folkloric representations of the Andes.
In Aymara there’s no direct trans-
lation for the word “prince.” Claure
renders the story’s title as Warawar
(star) Wawa (child), an artistic inter-
pretation he feels captures the spirit
of the book, embodies the spirituality
of the Andes—and leaves Eurocen-
tric notions behind. Through his lens,
Claure transforms the little prince into
a child of the stars. —SARA A. FAJARDO