We could hear shotguns.
This guy closed me inside this shack,
blocking the door with a padlock.
At the same time,
some bullets hit the walls of the shack.
This was the scariest moment in my entire career.
[DEVELOPING NEWS]
My name is Paolo Marchetti.
I worked for 13 years in the cinema industry.
But I always had this insane idea to become a photojournalist,
investigating the human behavior behind those stories I choose.
Here we are in China.
I was working on a project about child prostitution
in a particular city named Ruili.
All the city is involved with the market of jade,
and the town is full up of sellers and buyers,
professionals that during the night need to be entertained.
We are talking about child prostitution.
As you can notice, they are so young,
dancing and performing in this disco,
exposing themselves while customers try to choose what they prefer.
He worked in that disco,
and he was helping this visitor to choose his girl.
After the first choice,
customers approach the girls,
playing, drinking, and after several drinks,
the girls end up in the hands of the people much older than the girls.
They will go in a hotel room
or, for instance, in a karaoke room,
a place where girls continue performing, dancing, and singing.
With this picture, I try to represent the embarrassment of the girls.
It doesn’t tell nothing except her state of mind, her pain.
We are in Estonia.
Estonia has the greatest rate of deaths for overdose in Europe.
This guy here is Andrei, and he’s overdosed.
I was continuing to say,
“Let’s call an ambulance. Let’s call someone.
He’s going to die.”
Estonia is a very cold place.
And Andrei lived in this very precarious house.
Here on the right, you can notice the heater.
And believe me, it was not enough
because outside was -25°, -27° [Celsius].
Deeply cold. Deeply cold.
This is Arthur.
In this moment, he is in his kitchen to take his dose of fentanyl.
This drug arrived in Estonia
like a consequence of a Taliban ban in Afghanistan
about the opium.
This created a void in the European drug market.
European drug dealers start to substitute the opium
with the fentanyl,
and it worked.
The cost is much lower
and at the same time is ten times more dangerous than opium.
So this is a psychiatric hospital
during a psychologist session.
Putting him in relationship with the predator, his nightmare,
his enemy,
like a rabbit and an eagle that is trying to catch it.
This guy has explained to me, “The problem is not the drug.
The problem is myself.”
For this project, I traveled in Haiti for documenting the gangs phenomenon.
Haiti is one of the most dangerous and poor places
in the Western Hemisphere.
Cité Soleil is the name of this place,
the “City of the Sun.”
I was spending my time with the gangs.
This particular guy named Jackson,
in this moment, he was checking what was going on outside the shack
because when we heard the first gunshot,
we were outside this shack.
He grabbed my arm, and he literally pushed me down on the ground,
and he started to look outside to understand who was shooting.
Without telling me nothing,
at a certain point, he ran out, closing the door with a padlock.
I was terrified, honestly, and at the same time,
some bullets hit the walls of the shack.
After five or six minutes,
that door opened and Jackson get inside, smiling.
In that precise moment,
I figured out that he wanted to protect me.
He told me, “They know you are here,
and they are interested in your camera,
in your shoes, in the money that you have in your backpack.”
He saved me.
This was the scariest moment in my entire career.
This is Jackson in his bed.
He never separate himself from his gun.
I was attending a real moment,
able to document what they live every day.
We are in a garage outside Rome.
And these guys,
two times per week, organized fighting,
just to practice and remain ready, I suppose.
And in this garage, we have three flags:
the Celtic cross on the right, Mussolini,
and the Roman eagle they inherited from the Roman culture.
Fascism in Italy in those years, I’m talking about 2009,
was growing up very quickly.
My main contact, I spent a lot of time trying to obtain his trust,
and I spent three months without my camera
in order to get the access into the stories.
I took this image in Rome.
Matteo’s birthday party.
I met this guy when he was 16, two years before.
And I was surprised—
he asked to give me a call and invite me to the party.
I got inside the house.
I reached Matteo’s mother in the kitchen to say “Hi.”
That lady was, exactly in that moment,
was spraying the whipped cream on the cake.
It’s difficult to forget what you think
when you try to stay shoulder by shoulder
with people who you don’t like.
At the same time, they are welcoming you.
They are giving you a chance,
and this is a gift.
I want to look where nobody wants to look
because the only way to change things in our societies,
in all the world, is the dialog.
And... this is my truth.