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.
In my photography, there is searching, but even more, there is discovery. Reality is a permanent change, and in that movement, I find moments, forms, geometries that surprise me and from which I create images. Images are memory, and memory is invariably an interpretation. A photo looks like reality, but it is merely an appearance; there is always an artistic choice behind it. Working with the raw image is a dialogue where the original suggests how to work it, how to approach it, and how to tackle it; one must be open to finding something that may often be very different from what was originally anticipated. Another encounter, another surprise. Traveling shakes and compels. It is disconcerting to suddenly be among unfamiliar shapes, times, colors, lights, and shadows. The strangeness compels my eye to find a sense in the new. The images somehow lead me to understand and organize that reality. In the play of geometries and forms lies the content, the meaning, and if desired, the message. The intention of each image is not to reproduce reality, but to allow each moment extracted from the unfolding scenes to say something that awakens memories, thoughts, or generates associations. Life changes, and I change with it. What sparks my interest and curiosity varies, and there is no central theme in my photos. In photography, the small and seemingly trivial can contain great depth and enchantment. Change and what interests me vary. Nothing is trivial when it comes to artistic expression, and anything can awaken my curiosity. I let things happen and hope that a style emerges, something recognizable to those who see my photos and unconscious to me, like the style of my handwriting.”