Anuar Patjane is a social anthropologist, photographer and scuba diver born in Mexico in 1981.
"I believe in pure and unlimited creative power and try to avoid all stereotypes regarding what I do with my camera and with the photographs I create. Each and every photograph is unique, unrepeatable and endless; so should be their interpretations. I crave for moments depicting strong meanings and emotions and do what I can to capture them and create visual stories with them, stories that show the power of empathy... stories that focus the attention on places and moments which usually escape unnoticed. I cannot photograph the staged, the arranged. I need reality flowing the subject of my work as that is my element and what I enjoy photographing.
We cannot be just photographers, accountants, politicians or students anymore, our planet is reaching the point of no return in environmental equilibrium and action from everyone is needed. It is now necessary to do what we can to revert our aggressive behavior and carelessness towards our own planet, by educating ourselves and others and using all in our reach to change our behavior once and for all."
Underwater Realm Project
Conservation and protection of the oceans has become an urgent issue, and very few governments and NGOs are doing anything about this. In this underwater series, Anuar tries to drive our attention towards the beauty of our oceans and a truth usually unnoticed: We are brutally overfishing in our oceans, and our attention should be concentrated on the way we fish as well as what we eat from the ocean. We see and care when a forest is gone because it is visible to everybody, but we don't see when we destroy life underwater, we don't see how nets from the tuna, the shrimp industry and the whaling vessels cause damage and death to the sea. We are not familiar with this environment because we don't see what we destroy, and this needs to change very quickly so we can reverse this course. By sharing the beauty and poetry of our oceans we might start to care more and build the connection between the sea and ourselves.
