Taken at one of the salt flats located between Pampatar and Punta Ballena in Margarita Island, this photograph belongs to one of Paolo Gasparini’s first series. Crouching half way down with a plate in her hand, the girl was portrayed within an audacious framing which grants her figure a sense of monumentality.

Gasparini’s main influence at the onset of his career in the late 1950s was the photobook Un Paese, which included images by Paul Strand—one of the main representatives of North American social photography—and texts by Cesare Zavattini, head screenwriter Vittorio De Sica, with whom he had produced Bycicle Thieves (1958), one of the most important films in Italian Neorrealism.

In 1954, upon his arrival in Venezuela, Gasparini came into contact with the circle of intellectuals in Caracas through his brother, the architect Graziano Gasparini. There he created the Arquifoto studio, where he worked as an architecture photographer. Around that same period, he travelled to Bobare, a town located in the State of Lara where poverty was taking its toll, and subsequently published his first social reportages in the magazine Cruz del Sur. With this series of images he attempted to portray the darker side of oil developmentalism promoted by the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez.