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Remembering Wil Riera
5 March 2019
The freelance photojournalist Wil Riera, who covered his native Venezuela for BBC, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, died March 2. He was 36 and had suffered from a congenital disorder that led to a stroke in 2018. He was recuperating from brain surgeries to address the disorder.
In a tribute to him, Visura.co founder Adriana Teres Letorney wrote:
As a photojournalist and citizen of humanity, his commitment to the people of Venezuela and in shedding light to the political and humanitarian crisis that was transpiring was exceptional. He was willing to do whatever it took and always pushing to improve his craft with the hopes that through his work, the international media and audience would take interest in what was happening in Venezuela. There are so many emails, where he expressed concern or frustration about his work not being picked up fast enough by media outlets, not because of any egocentric need for recognition, but because what was happening in Venezuela was a humanitarian crisis. It pained him to see so many people struggling and he wanted to help through his work.
Among his more notable stories was While We Are Here, a 2017 photo essay documenting the lives of Venezuelan seniors struggling to survive the country's collapse. NPR has updated its January look at the project in Remembering Wil Riera: The Photographer With an Eye for the Forgotten in Venezuela.
Riera spent eight years working as an engineer in Caracas before discovering his passion for photography in 2013. He studied photojournalism for a year at The International Center of Photography in New York before attending the Eddie Adams Workshop in 2016.
Since 2014 he had lived and worked in Caracas covering the Venezuelan political and economic crisis.
His work can be seen on his Website and on his Instagram page.