PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOJOURNALISM VIDEO by PAUL SMITH

PROJECTS/EXHIBITIONS: The Dream Factory - Football & landscapes of urban poverty

The first part of a series on street football in Latin America, where the national teams carry the country's pride on their shoulders, yet the players are plucked from some of the most maginalised, excluded and stigmatised sectors of those societies.

Football is a distraction: a newer, more potent opiate which, along with the lottery and the soap opera industries can assure that energies and passions that could be applied to matters of everyday existence are more safely chanelled into "fantasy pursuits".

In retrospect, the game imported to the Americas by British sailors in the 19th century (founding the first club in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1867) has contributed more towards maintaining the status quo of the continent than anything ever devised in the School of the Americas.*

* - School of the Americas: A US military training facility many of whose graduates have been implicted in human rights violations throughout Latin America.

But all that aside football is, when played, a healthy pursuit where young men (and women too) can learn the value of team work and hard graft whilst working towards a goal. In Colombia, as in many other developing nations, it is also one of the few, if not the only opportunity to compete on a level playing field that a poor youth will get.

Whilst football can be celebrated for allowing a few to escape neighbourhoods stigmatised by poverty and often by violence, the fact that the poor-boy-made-good celebrities will always have voice and presence on the national/ international stage should make the absence of voice and the invisibility of the communities from whence they have sprung even more striking.

Photographs taken with a Mamiya 7ii, 80mm, 43mm & 150mm lenses.

Coming soon - The Dream Factory - Brazil, Argentina & Paraguay. (posted 26 August 2011).