Burden of Dreams

I am a wanderer. I have spent my life with dreams that I seek to materialize. These aspirations have lead me to a photographic life. An existence that revolves around voyeuristic instinct.

In the course of my life thus far, I have traveled, experienced, survived, and tried to observe what passed around me. I find it a challenge to live in the moment and absorb all the visual stimulis the world has to offer. This is where my camera has come in to rescue me. It is a device I have used to catalogue the world around me, so that I may remember what I have seen and how I have seen it.

It really comes down to a method of control that began with a 110 minolta box camera.

When I was young, my family would travel to far away places. I've seen more slums and museum walls filled with religious art than I think any child can palette. My father catalogued in great detail every trip we took. Many years we returned to the same exact locations and he would take the same exact picture. I don't know if he had any real artistic intent. He just felt the need to catalogue things. Now you can go to my parents house and ask them to see a picture of the pyramids and they will tell you they don't know where it is. This is because the photo library of all this cataloguing has amounted to a mountain of boxes crammed away into the closet of the extra bedroom.

I think by default of the prescence of a camera in what seemed a large part of my youth, I have found the object a comfort that is inseperable from my life. It could be because, the way I was able to have a commonality with the quiet man who was my father, was the camera. Therefore, it is how I have learned to observe and confront the world.

When I ventured into my own journeys around the world, I traveled with nothing but this object as a confidant to share the experiences with. My memory is famous for its short span, and so I have depended on it as a friend to remind me of the most intimate moments and adventurous experiences. Over time, I shot thousands of bad photographs, but in this process (that had drained my bank accounts), I learned how to see.

What I think I have learned, that my father had not, is that the pictures that we have seen of places that made them look so inviting was the result of a chosen perspective. Perspective is what makes the world an interesting place. There are those moments when something ordinary has a little detail that sends it to another dimension. These are the things I either search out or try to create. I have developed an insatiable love of light and how it dramatizes the ordinary.

What I got from my mother, other than a Central American ancestry, is a love for movies. She gave me the beginnings of an appreciation for narrative. Our one bonding point is the many hours we spent watching movie classics and discussions about the power of a good story.

These two elements, a love of light and story, are what motivate every photograph I take.

There is nothing like the feeling of throwing together a scene and finding an extraordinary moment captured in a still frame. It is my greatest passion and my greatest frustration. Because even after many hours of preparation, there has been failure. Then in times of a mindless snapshot generated from instinct, there are those successes. I think what I would define as photographic success would be the ability to create such moments on command. I know I can create a visually pleasing image. But making a photograph that is arresting and will make people look beyond the frame with some kind of inquiry, is another thing entirely.

There are more practical paths and more secure careers. But my ambition, this addiction to capture or create some wonderful truth with light and drama, the successes, achievements, frustrations and mistakes are all ingredients to my burden of dreams.

The photograph I have attached, is one of those moments I could had never forseen. I just happened to be in India, sitting at the base of this building on the edge of the Ganges River and pointed my camera up.