Raffaele Petralla
Roma, Italia
Raffaele Petralla is a documentary photographer who graduated from the Scuola Romana di Fotografia in 2007.
He has worked on film sets as light assistant, focus puller and director of photography, than he decided to devote himself entirely to documentary photography, paying particular attention to social and anthropological issues.
His personal works and assignments have been published on the main media worldwide including: New York Times, National Geographic U.S.A., Geo Magazine, New York Times, Internazionale, L’Espresso, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, D Repubblica settimanale, Days Japan, Terra Mater, La Repubblica, De Morgen, VICE to name a few.
In recent years Petralla has received many awards and nominees including: PDN storytellers, Burn Emerging Fund, Premio Fotografia Etica, Moscow Photo Awards, Organ Vida, Siena International Photography Awards, Lugano Photo Days, Verzasca Foto Festival, Fotoleggendo, Premio Voglino, Prix ANI, Intarget Photolux award, Portfolio Italia 2019.
Since 2015 he has been a member of the Prospekt Photographers agency. He is a teacher of documentary photography at the Centro Romano di Fotografia and Cinema in Rome and at the Spaziotempo School of Photography in Bari.
2016 - PDN Visual Story Teller 2016 , 2016 - Premio Voglino 2016, 2015 - Burn Emerging Fund , 2017 - Lugano Photo Days , 2017 - Organ Vida Festival , 2018 - Best photo dummy - Premio Voglino, 2019 - Best Portfolio Italia 2019
- Editorial
- Environment
- Portrait
- Reporting
Mari People, A Pagan Beauty.
Raffaele Petralla
There is a population with Finnish ancestors living in a rural area near Joshkar-ola, in the Republic of Mari-El, Russia. They are called Mari, speak a language belonging to the Ugro- Finnic and use a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet. They settled in this area around the fifth century a.C.
The current population is about 600,000 people.
Mari people are the last pagan population of the West. They live in symbiotic relationship with nature, which is celebrated as the basis of their existence. Nature exerts a magical religiosity on people. In the twentieth century, with the rise of the Soviet Union, it was officially forbidden to celebrate rituals and sacrifices. Poverty and unemployment led young people to migrate to the big cities in search of a stable future, abandoning their villages and their ancient traditions. In this journey back to the origins of man, in search of languages and cultures not yet disappeared, we came across this peasant ethic not yet affected by time.
