When I first started getting interested in photography and leafing through the pages of photo books and magazines, I defined my goal as a wannabe photographer to take photos that were timeless. I soon realized that this is pretty much what every documentary and street photographer strives to achieve. They look up to Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, etc., and try to recreate that style. Although I believe these photographers are often only appreciated later in life, even decades later, mostly because people are nostalgic by nature, and so photos of NYC in the 80s simply evoke a different feeling than if the same photo was taken today. The problem today is that people just want to relive what they have seen in a Tarantino movie or in a Garry Winogrand book. They have so many preconceptions about what type of images they want to create that they lose sight of what their heart tells them. And I believe I struggle with this too. In the past few years, I've realized that photography is about feelings, emotions, and the photo is simply a tool to convey that emotion. If you keep looking for a specific scene to recreate from a movie or another piece of media, you don’t give yourself permission to listen to yourself. Anyway, I’m going on a rant..

I was an observer of life more than a participant. I liked to observe. I mean, now that I hear myself, I sound like a depressed nerd who was not invited to parties. As a matter of fact, I’ve had a great time so far: I have met beautiful, intelligent women, traveled and partied around the world, collected a couple of classic cars, experimented with drugs, all while making enough money to make me independent enough that I don’t have to pursue uninteresting jobs. But while doing all this, I also developed a very introspective disposition that led me to look at others as a way to understand myself. From wanting to take timeless photos, after lots of introspection and observation, I realized I was more interested in emotions, rather than the photo per se. How can I capture an emotion through the photographic medium? In photography, many emphasize the ability to observe with your eyes, but while this might allow you to take visually pleasing images, evoking an emotion has more to do with what you are feeling rather than what you see. It’s more about the ability to approach your subjects and match their feelings with yours, allowing what you bring inside to come out through them, through faces, features, gestures. It's not photography per se that I'm attracted to, but rather making what is imprinted on film as close as possible to what my soul feels. I’m still very far from this ultimate goal.

There is also a more pragmatic side to photography. Alec Soth once said, “I fell in love with photography because it was an excuse to wander around alone.” Photography helped me deal with depression. As someone who is very introspective, at times I can feel very down. Ultimately, photography gets me out of the house.