Pie Aerts received 2^nd Prize in the Edition X of the Life Framer Series Award. His beautiful long-term project stood out to judges Lisa Woodward and Mia Dalglish, co-curators at Pictura Gallery.

Pie Aerts’s finely tuned sense of color and light in Los Puesteros is extraordinary. The delicate warm tones bring a soft fragility to the hard world of these men who live and work at remote Chilean outposts. The softness is a way in; it unifies the work and the separate worlds of the men, even as they are many miles apart.

Aerts knows how to focus in on the details that have emotional potency. Instead of showing a scene in its entirety, he includes a photograph with only a hand, tightly gripping a barbed wire fence. He carefully directs the gaze, simplifying the frame and holding us there in the scene.

These are not quick portraits made in passing. The unguarded expressions in the eyes of the men and in their gestures are the fruit of time spent with a person. If photography can open the window to really see a person, it’s in this kind of portraiture.

- Mia Dalglish + Lisa Woodward

See more of Pie’s work HERE

Learn more about the Life Framer Series Award HERE