Otherworldly Landscapes and Bolivian Tradition Merge in River Claure’s Mystical Images — Colossal

“Some people say that my work questions dominant notions of cultural identity, and perhaps that’s true,” says Bolivian photographer River Claure. “But I’m drawn to many things, such as thinking about landscapes, or the way clouds appear in a bright blue sky in some of my photographs.”

Claure’s atmospheric pictures seize every day life and dream-like scenes in Bolivia, infused with magical realism, that immediate our curiosity about neighborhood, narrative, and the land. He’s primarily based in a valley referred to as Cochabamba, the place his grandparents immigrated within the Seventies to flee political conflicts of their former dwelling, an Indigenous Andean neighborhood referred to as Calacota.

Growing up, “I was not very conscious—nor did I value my Indigenous roots at all; in fact, it is something I specifically denied,” Claure says in an interview with koozArch. “I remember episodes in my teens where I didn’t want my friends in high school to know that my grandmother was Chola. It was something of which I was ashamed, although of course now, I find that ridiculous.”

When Claure started committing himself critically to creating artwork, he was woke up to his ancestry and area people in a brand new approach, realizing that what he had tried to suppress in his youth was truly precisely what he most wanted to discover. His work is commonly knowledgeable by Christian symbolism, akin to within the Virgin Cerro works, wherein a determine sits inside a mound of sand and assumes the type of a non secular icon.

Play is one other characteristic of his observe, not simply within the tableaux he captures—akin to soccer gamers and expressive native youngsters—but additionally in his method. “I would say I play a lot: I play professionally,” Claure says in a press release. “I play in a kind of grand contemporary theater, blending everything: my family’s history, my Indigenous roots, my post-internet contradictions, fashion, literature, the Latin American colonial archive, foundational myths, and much more.”

His work is imbued with a way of nostalgia—a eager for connections to “the mystical, the epic, and the sacred, in order to create rituals of my own invention,” he says. In scenes that volley between happenstance and choreography, he explores time, neighborhood, and relationships between actuality and fantasy.

Claure’s photographs emphasize people, Indigenous customs, the earth, and perception techniques as a approach of resisting capitalistic influences. And by way of compositions that really feel dreamy and mysterious—even timeless—he generates his personal myths as a technique to query values and the forces of transition.

As a part of the 2026 Vital Impacts awards, which help photographers who illuminate environmental challenges inside their communities, Claure is the recipient of the E.O. Wilson Fellowship. The fellowship helps his challenge titled A Boat for the Future of the Mountains, which he describes as “a time capsule project” targeted on communities within the Bolivian Andes the place lakes and rivers are disappearing. See extra on his Instagram.