Terra Incognita is a Documentary photographic project that attempts to rescue and reveal to the world South America's Cultural and Natural Heritage utilizing modern Documentary Photography as its main tool, besides texts. A huge variety of themes, most of them unknown to the international audiencies, will be displayed in Terra Incognita collection of books. Culture and Nature of faraway places, most of them quite difficult to approach, will fullfill Terra Incognita's gorgeous pages. The project´s goal is to match the per se attraction of the theme with its photographic interpretation: photography will be used as a creative tool and not merely as a registration instrument. A subtle mix between documentation and art will be constantly pursued. Fieldwork is the key stage to all the process, because that's when contents are created. Fieldwork implies travelling and staying in rare and exotic places of South America, hardly visited by tourism. Geography, History, Ethnography, Geology, traditional Festivals, old economic practices, art, everyday life, characters, Archeology and other areas of knowledge will be the main themes where Photography will act. The author of Terra Incognita, Lic. Andrés Salinero, hopes this huge effort touches the heart of people around the world and permits him to go on with this life long adventure into knowledge and beautiness.
About the Author: Photographer Andrés Salinero was born the 26 January 1963 in the city of La Plata, province of Buenos Aires capital district, Argentina. He began photographing at 8 thanks to his father Heraldo, an engineer and amateur photographer himself. Being 15 he traveled to Mexico, where he was deeply moved by this Country's pre-Hispanic, native cultural heritage, and the old, little towns hanging from the central mountains, like Taxco. Influenced by that trip and other untransferable experiences (like Carlos Castaneda and Julio Cortázar readings), he noticed he had deeply felt in love with Documentary Photography -and travelling, of course. Salinero studied Journalism and Mass Communications, Cultural Anthropology, Philosophy and the History of Arts at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he also worked as a photographer during ten years. After graduating, attending a course in Visual Anthropology and a brief interlude in New York, he returned to Argentina and began to freelance for Clarín Editorial Group in Buenos Aires, and for international magazines like National Geographic and Altaïr (Sapiens Publicacións, Barcelona). In 2001 he won a World Press Prize in Photography, and associated with agencies and book editors from Buenos Aires as a photographer, writer and co-editor. In 2010, he fully devoted to his own editorial project, Terra Incognita, which he had created during his teenage years. By these days, he is engaged full time to this long term project. Salinero is also the author of three experimental essays: Reality, Gulp! and Cielito Lindo. Besides Photography, Salinero likes jazz, literature and paintwork. His preferred hobbies are tennis and watching international Rally races. Salinero still lives in the same city where he and his parents were born: La Plata, 60 kms. south from Buenos Aires megalopolis. He thinks of himself as a "rioplatense" -a citizen of the river. Despite having two University titles, Salinero is as a self-taught photographer.