Rui Caria's exhibition 'Women of the Land', which celebrates women who work in the fields, opened at the Arquipélago - Centro de Artes Contemporâneas. The work, which was made in 2021 after an invitation from Leica to exhibit at the gallery in Porto, came from an old image that Caria kept in his memory but had never recorded in photography.

"This work came about because many years ago I saw a woman working with cows here on Terceira Island and I thought of that image. It was raining a lot at the time and I did not record the moment," he recalled, adding: "I had never seen a woman working with cows and I kept thinking about that image; in 2021 I thought of producing something that represented the women of the island and the Azores. There are few women in the country working in this area, which gave me the impetus I needed to pursue this work."

So Caria decided to photograph the daily lives of eight Azorean women aged between 21 and 80: Lisandra, Beatriz, Virgínia, Verónica, Denise, Nélia, Isilda and Urselina. Women  who help their families, full time or part time, in this hard daily activity which is one of the main sources of income for many families on Terceira Island.

"I worked with them for a few months. And even though they said they helped their husbands, I noticed that every time I saw a woman working, her husband would stand to the side and help them. This bothered me, given the stereotype we have of men's and women's work, which is increasingly unrealistic," he said.

“There is a certain lack of normality in this work as we know it. Could we imagine working every day, all our lives, without a day off, a weekend, or without being able to travel?" he asks, recalling that every day of the year these women go out to milk the cows and tend the pastures.
The photographer’s work, which was presented in August 2021 at the Leica Galeria in Porto, has already been shown in various places in the country, such as Santa Maria, Nazaré and Angra do Heroísmo.

Promoted by AFAA - Associação de Fotógrafos Amadores dos Açores, in partnership with Arquipélago - Centro de Artes Contemporâneas, the exhibition opened on September 9 on the top floor of the Centro de Artes store.

Rui Caria, who was born in Nazaré in 1972 and lives in Praia da Vitória, on Terceira Island, began making small commercial films in 1990, becoming a correspondent for TVI, where he remained as a reporter and picture editor until 2003. He is a certified multimedia trainer, reporter and image editor, and has been a correspondent in the Azores for SIC since 2006. He collaborates as a photojournalist with several national and international newspapers. A winner and finalist in several international competitions, his photos have been published in several international photography books. In 2016, he was awarded a silver camera by the European Federation of Photographers in the photojournalism category in the 2016 European Photographer of the Year competition. In 2019 he won the first prize at the Sony World Photography Awards.