Yapci Ramos
Perras, 2015

“Charlie got me inside. He greets the owner. I pay and go up to Sandra Patricia’s room. Sandra Patricia is a beautiful dark-skinned Colombian with well-kept, long curly hair. Her voice was barely audible, quivering as she spoke. She covered my camera with a pillow. We began to chat… What shocked me the most about Aruba was the amount of stray dogs all over the island.” – Yapci Ramos

A series of photographs of abandoned, battered dogs roaming a destitute neighbourhood in Aruba, are surrogates for the prostitutes who ply their trade there. Instead of the women, it is the dogs that are caught in the hard, quick light of the camera’s flash as prey, victims, discards – and perhaps as survivors. In Aruba, Ramos discovered the stark parallels between prostitution and the derided stray dogs that wander the streets of the small Caribbean island with nothing but their raw survival instincts to guide them. This project is about prostitution as a survival mechanism with adverse consequences to the prostitutes which are hard if not impossible to capture through the medium of photography.

Excerpt from essay by Daniel Gauss, Art Writer at Wall Street International Magazine.