© Karla Hiraldo Volaeau, courtesy of SPBH Editions
French-Dominican photographer Karla Hiraldo Voleau was often told, “never date a Dominican”. It was a piece of advice she shrugged off. Both she and her cousin were born to French mothers and Dominican fathers while her French grandmother had also travelled to the Dominican Republic and fallen in love with a local man.
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“I was like, ‘But every one of you guys dated a Dominican so… what the heck?’” Hiraldo Voleau says with a laugh from her home in Lausanne, Switzerland. Growing up, she would travel to Santo Domingo, the island’s capital, every summer and she decided to return once more to do a project exploring love, sex and the relationships between men and women that have long fascinated her.
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“I was intrigued by these foreign white women who come to the Caribbean to have this escape, this tropical love story, and wanted to impersonate one,” Hiraldo Voleau says, subverting the traditional idea of sexual tourism. The result is Hola Mi Amol, a shortlist nominee for Aperture’s First PhotoBook Award, which will be featured in the 2020 Foam Talent exhibition.
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© Karla Hiraldo Volaeau, courtesy of SPBH Editions