International photographer Alfredo D’Amato visits Alliance Mozambique
24 September 2007
In May, international photographer Alfredo D’Amato visited Alliance Mozambique, where he photographed orphans and vulnerable children and people living with HIV in Beira and Manica. D’Amato visited 16 Beira families, many of whom were headed by single mothers whose husbands had died of AIDS, and are benefiting from the help of Alliance partners Khalira and Mães Intercessoras to take care of their children.
D’Amato also visited Machipanda, a town in Manica province on the border with Zimbabwe. The province has the highest HIV prevalence in Mozambique, at an estimated 19.7%. There are many immigrants and truck drivers along the border, and sex work flourishes in Machipanda. Hosted by OMES, an Alliance partner organisation which targets HIV prevention interventions at sex workers along the border region, D’Amato interviewed and photographed some of the region’s sex workers. All were single mothers: either their husbands had died of AIDS, or they had been abandoned or orphaned and left with few choices but sex work to support their siblings.
See the pictures and stories of some of the families he visited.
Alfredo D’Amato, international photographer, 30
Born in Porticello, Italy, in October 1977, Alfredo D’Amato took up photography in 1997, that same year winning the best young photographer’ prize at the photojournalism exhibition of the Agricantus Cultural Centre in Palermo. In May 1998, he won a Nikon grant in the Toscana photographic workshop and a special prize in the annual Alberobello festival.
D’Amato subsequently graduated in Documentary Photography from Newport College, University of Wales, and his work earned him first place in the Observer Hodge Photographic award in 2003. In 2004, he received first prize in the photojournalism section of the One Media awards, and third place in the international UNICEF Photo of the Year Competition.
D’Amato is a member of Panos Photographic Agency (UK). His pictures have been published in several daily papers in Palermo, and lately in Gente di fotografia, a famous Italian photographic magazine. He is currently carrying out personal research in the field of creative photography.
