Hinchada

‘Hinchada’ is Latin-American name of football fans. The community of football fans is one of the largest in the world. In 2014 the Football World Cup will be celebrated in Brazil, one of the biggest events of the XXI century.

In Latin America, football is considered as a second religion, and Latin American fans are renowned in the world for their passion for the game. There are fans who form the football culture of countries, making a show before our eyes. Each country in Latin America has the football Classico (derby), sometimes with a hundred-year history of rivalry between two teams, and the performances of fans deserve to go down in the history of the world football.

The objective of my project is the investigation of football life in Latin America.

More and more fans in the world would prefer to watch football on TV. With the high technology of live broadcasting, TV is gradually winning more and more viewers, and now the noisy company of like-minded fans is situated not in the stadium, but prefers to stay at home with some litres of beer. The television can replace the scoreboard in the stadium, but it will never show the spirit of football. Before the TV screen you become just a spectator, and in the stands you are a full member of the football spectacle.

In my project I want to tell about the fans’ culture, the real passion and love for football. I'm sure that fans of Latin America will gradually lose their passion for football as it happened in Europe. The gradual tightening of the rules for attending matches drives to increasingly limit the fans. But still now we can observe one of the most important and vibrant performances of our time, the Latin American football. 

Maria Plotnikova, was born in 1984 in Moscow. Studied philology at the Moscow State Pedagogical University. During my studies I started working as a photographer, which gradually led me to my favorite genre, sports photography. In 2006 - 2010 I worked exclusively as a sports photographer in the various media of Moscow (“Izvestia”, “Novaya Gazeta”, TASS, “Sport day by day”). In 2007 I graduated from the one-year photojournalism course at Moscow State University. The results of this work in sports photography were different awards in Russian contests for photojournalism. In 2010 my husband and I moved to Buenos Aires, then to Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Latin America, I became a freelance artist and interested in the genre of street photography. Having had the opportunity to travel around the continent, for two years now, I don´t now hesitate to shoot in search of my own style of street photography. In 2012 I was short-listed in the London Festival of Photography and became a finalist of the Moscow Festival of street photography. Since 2012 I have been a member of the international collective Street Photographers http://www.street-photographers.com/ and the collective Momentum http://momentumstreet.com/. In 2012 I was selected as a winner of Portfolio Review in the Festival of Light (Buenos Aires) http://encuentrosabiertos.com.ar/.
Web: http://mariaplotnikova.com/

Exhibitions (selected): 

2013 “Football fans”, PhotoVisa international festival, Krasnodar, Russia, personal

2013 “Little man”, Tbilisi Photo Festival, Georgia

2013 “Buenos Aires”, Boston and New York, The Fence Festival

2012 “Fútbol, pasion de multitudes” (Football, passion of the millions), Buenos Aires, Festival de la Luz (Festival of Light), personal 

2012 “Pasión carnavalesca” (Carnival passion), Buenos Aires, Festival de la Luz (Festival of Light), personal 

2012 “Despedida del Titán”, La Rioja, Argentina, Festival of Light, personal 

2012 Russia Street photography festival, Moscow, Rostov-na-Donu, Krasnodar, group exhibition 

Awards

2012 London Festival of Street Photography, shortlisted

2012 Russia Street photography festival, finalist

2012 Termin International competition of young art, winner in category Reportage

2011 Sport Russia contest,  II and III place