Lens Culture / FEATURE Zurumbático

I must admit that I’ve been a bit obsessed about this photo project since the moment I first experienced it in Cortona, Italy, in the summer of 2017. This book takes visual storytelling to a new sophisticated level for me (much in the same way that Gregory Halpern’s masterpiece from 2016, ZZYZX, sticks in my mind). And I am reminded of the immense power that photography has to tell imaginary tales — by creating geography, cultures and characters that seem to operate in a parallel universe, governed by a unique but somehow believable dream logic.

Taking his cues from the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s most well-known novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Venezuelan photographer Luis Cobelo has captured photos of real people and places in South America to create his own mythical mindset, Zurumbático. The sequence and flow of the wordless images are seductive from the opening pages, creating a powerfully interconnected cinematic experience that lingers in the reader’s mind long after the book is closed.