PENDULUM
For Felipe Passolas, life is not
something that stands still
INTERVIEW:
BY KARL WEBSTER
Rather it’s always on the move and must be pursued and captured before it
gets away. Capturing life for Felipe means not only experiencing it firsthand
and becoming immersed in the sights, sounds, smells and conversations of
a particular place or event – it also means taking pictures.
For the seven years that Felipe has been travelling as a professional photojournalist, he has tended to specialise in extremes. From the searing,
scorching desert heat of Central Asia to the howling ferocity of northern
Norway’s destructive cyclones; from vicious, blinding African sandstorms
to the suffocating humidity of subtropical Latin America, Felipe feels that
life is at its most fascinating where human beings are forced to adapt and to
struggle in order to survive and more often it’s the unpredictability of those
very human beings that tends to provide the most dangerous situations.
This is the first insight I get into Felipes dual life as he informs me of his
experience of border conflicts past and present from Colombia to Syria. “In
terms of wild nature, Mongolia was hard because I was alone in the jungle,
while in Norway or the Amazon I always made sure I was having somehow
some local closer to me to ask for support in case of emergency.”
Passolas is also something of a contradiction. As well as being one of life’s
true adventurers – never happier than when he’s riding a horse through
the vast, wild grasslands of Mongolia or hiding out from election-riots in
Senegal – he also has a solid background in finance and worked for many
years as a financial analyst and then a prop trader. So how on earth did
he make the transition from the trading floor to photographing rainforest
tree-frogs or Russian militiamen?