A need for a new language

At 23, I was forced to move to an entirely new world. The language, the culture, the climate, the food, the colors were all foreign. Nothing matched what I knew or was used to. I had suddenly become mute and deaf.

That is when I found and embraced photography.

Taking pictures became the tool to understand the world I was in. It gave me the opportunity to capture and acquaint myself with the foreign. Through a mysterious ritual in a darkroom, negatives were developed and enlarged to eventually reveal fragments of the new world printed on a damp paper print. Picture by picture, I began to unveil reality. By looking at the pictures over and over again, objects, textures, and people slowly became familiar; and with them, so did my new reality.