Interiors

When I arrive to a small rural community I get out and talk to people. 'I am looking for places like these, general stores, bars, old shops, any funky place like these,' I ask while flipping through my binder with photographs I have taken in other towns. My work takes a collaborative nature because the people I meet point me to new locations, and that’s how I build my itinerary.

During the actual photographic process, I develop a short but intense relationship with the environment I am in and sometimes with their owners as well. The large-format camera goes on a tripod, it is a wooden box with interchangeable lenses and a bellows extension, like ‘the ones they used to have in the plaza.’

While focusing, measuring, dragging and looking through the dark cloth, the place slowly begins to breathe, it grows and comes alive.

This is what I am looking for: to transcend the purely descriptive /objective quality of photography and achieve a more subjective and intuitive way of looking, what Roland Barthes describes in Camera Lucida as… ‘a kind of subtle beyond... To the words of Barthes I add the fact that all these places are on the verge of dissappearing or already gone. The subtle beyond is connected to their inevitable closing.

Many times I am asked ‘Why aren’t there any people in your photographs?’

My answer is ‘Look closely, they are all over the place.’

These places are filled with traces of human presence: objects, furniture, stuff hanging from the walls, accumulations on display. They speak to me of the invisible, stories to be imagined, and, ultimately, the acknowledgement of our own transience in this world.