Juan Solorzano

I am a Venezuelan visual journalist living in Mexico City. I studied Mass Communication and started my career as a news photographer freelancing for the AP covering presidential elections, an experience that eventually gave me the opportunity to be Venezuela's late president Hugo Chavez's photographer.

After almost eleven years, realizing that what was supposed to be two 6-year-terms had no end in sight and having an urge to completely reinvent myself professionally, I pursued training in videojournalism, helped photo colleagues learn video shooting with HDSLR cameras and joined the first newsroom in Venezuela to fully adopt video storytelling for its website.

That was a really exciting time for a journalist with the country's political, economic and social systems under a major transformation and on the brink of collapse; but a really bad one to have twin newborns.

After struggling during the babies' first years, my wife and I decided to look for opportunities in Mexico, where we moved in 2016.

Three years later and after taking every possible freelance job, I got to be part of the new Thomson Reuters Global Pictures Desk Mexico bureau where I edit and process the work of Reuters photographers from all over the world.

That is the fastest-paced news photo editing possible, therefore my interest in joining this year's Kalish workshop: to learn the most of the slow-paced, narrative aspect of visual editing that elevates photographers' work to become memorable stories.