Paolo Woods

Paolo Woods grew up in Italy in a Dutch-Canadian family. From 1991 to 2000 he ran a black and white professional photo lab and a photography gallery in Florence named Print. In 1999 he turned to documentary photography and went to Iran to document the reforms President Khatami was trying to implement. There he met the writer and journalist Serge Michel. From 2000 to 2002, together with Michel, Woods travelled through twelve countries – among them the United States, Iraq, Angola, Kazakhstan and Russia – following the route of oil production and trade, conducting a behind-the-scenes investigation of the industry.[12] In 2002 and 2004 they worked in Afghanistan and Iraq, producing a detailed reportage on the westerners' debacle there that eventually became the book American Chaos. In the same years, Woods, Michel and Claude Baechtold founded Riverboom, a collective and publisher, later joined by Gabriele Galimberti and Edoardo Delille.[13]

In 2005 Woods won his first World Press Photo award in General News.[14]

In 2007 and 2008 Woods worked across Africa documenting the birth of "Chinafrica",[n 1] the spectacular rise of the Chinese who were then massively investing in Africa and had changed the geopolitical order[15] (see Africa–China economic relations). The resulting book, coauthored with Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, has been translated to eleven languages and has been acclaimed as the most thorough investigation of the phenomenon, and as an example of art and documentary photography united. It sold more than 40,000 copies in France alone.[16]

In 2010 Woods completed the work Marche sur mes yeux, an intimate portrait of Iran, hoping to overcome the stereotyped vision of the country and show the complexity of its identities. The photographs were widely published and exhibited in galleries and festivals such as the Rencontres d'Arles in France[2] and Festival Images Vevey in Switzerland.[17]

In 2010 Woods moved to Haiti. For four years he worked there on the project State, which recounts the islanders' experience and describes the dynamics at work in all the developing countries: international organisations versus local government, civil society versus executive power, private versus public money. The project grew three-dimensional in Haiti including a book, coauthored with a prize-winning[18] Swiss journalist Arnaud Robert, that was translated into Haitian Creole, an exhibition outside Faculté d'Ethnologie (Université d'État d'Haïti) of Port-au-Prince and the outdoor installations across the city realised with the support of local artists.[7][19] The first exhibition of the project in Europe was hosted at the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne.[5]

In 2012 he received his second World Press Photo award in the Daily Life section for his reportage on the importance of the radio network in Haiti.[20]

In an interview with the New York Times, Woods said about his work:

Photojournalists tend to divide the world into good and bad. You constantly find those two elements that we so clearly think define our vision of the world. But things are a lot more mixed. There are not just bad guys and good guys. That is what is interesting to me, to get into the nuances and make images that are not answers, but raise more questions.[21]

In 2013 Woods and Robert published another book set in Haiti, Pèpè.[22]

In 2014, in collaboration with an Italian photographer, Gabriele Galimberti, Woods completed The Heavens, an investigation into tax havens.[1] This premiered with an exhibition at Rencontres d'Arles in 2015 [23] and is still touring worldwide. The photobook was chosen as among the best of 2015 by Martin Parr,[24] by three curators for LensCulture,[25] and by Holly Stuart Hughes for Photo District News.[26]

Paolo Woods is currently working on his first documentary film, Happy Pills, co-directed with Arnaud Robert.[27]

• Official website
• Riverboom
• The Heavens LLC
• Marche sur mes yeux, as archived by the Wayback Machine on 10 July 2012