Women behind the lens: ‘They waited in a kind of deranged inactivity for the possibility of a visit’

<p>In her portraits from an overcrowded Venezuelan detention centre, Ana María Arévalo Gosen captures the frustration of women desperate for news from their lawyers and families</p><p>This photograph was taken inside the Poli-Valencia detention centre, where I began to understand what imprisonment means for women in Venezuela. The room had once been an investigation office, converted into a cell after authorities decided to move the women out of the main area, where they had been held alongside male detainees.</p><p>When I returned a year later, the space had been transformed. The women had made it their own, covering the walls with names, phrases and small drawings of hearts, even taping up a poster of the Colombian singer Maluma. What had once been a sterile office now held traces of their presence, their effort to hold on to a sense of identity in a place meant to erase it.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/dec/03/women-venezuela-prison-photography-drugs-family">Continue reading...</a>