“Some people say that my work questions dominant notions of cultural identity, and perhaps that’s true,” says Bolivian photographer River Claure. “But I’m drawn to many things, such as thinking about landscapes, or the way clouds appear in a bright blue sky in some of my photographs.”
Claure’s atmospheric photos capture daily life and dream-like scenes in Bolivia, infused with magical realism, that prompt our curiosity about community, narrative, and the land. He’s based in a valley called Cochabamba, where his grandparents immigrated in the 1970s to escape political conflicts in their former home, an Indigenous Andean community called Calacota.
Growing up, “I was not very conscious—nor did I value my Indigenous roots at all; in fact, it is something I specifically denied,” Claure says in an interview with koozArch. “I remember episodes in my teens where I didn’t want my friends in high school to know that my grandmother was Chola. It was something of which I was ashamed, although of course now, I find that ridiculous.”
When Claure began committing himself seriously to making art, he was awakened to his ancestry and local community in a new way, realizing that what he had tried to suppress in his youth was actually exactly what he most needed to explore. His work is often informed by Christian symbolism, such as in the Virgin Cerro works, in which a figure sits within a mound of sand and assumes the form of a religious icon.
Play is another feature of his practice, not just in the tableaux he captures—such as soccer players and expressive local children—but also in his approach. “I would say I play a lot: I play professionally,” Claure says in a statement. “I play in a kind of grand contemporary theater, blending everything: my family’s history, my Indigenous roots, my post-internet contradictions, fashion, literature, the Latin American colonial archive, foundational myths, and much more.”
His work is imbued with a sense of nostalgia—a longing for connections to “the mystical, the epic, and the sacred, in order to create rituals of my own invention,” he says. In scenes that volley between happenstance and choreography, he explores time, community, and relationships between reality and fantasy.
Claure’s images emphasize individuals, Indigenous customs, the earth, and belief systems as a way of resisting capitalistic influences. And through compositions that feel dreamy and mysterious—even timeless—he generates his own myths as a way to question values and the forces of transition.
As part of the 2026 Vital Impacts awards, which support photographers who illuminate environmental challenges within their communities, Claure is the recipient of the E.O. Wilson Fellowship. The fellowship supports his project titled A Boat for the Future of the Mountains, which he describes as “a time capsule project” focused on communities in the Bolivian Andes where lakes and rivers are disappearing. See more on his Instagram.
