I start with nothing and I try to make something of it. That’s all.
Sometimes I get too serious and transcendent about my work, but to say the truth (or at least something truer), taking photographs is the only way I’ve found to take my way-to-perfect-and- way-too-rigid-to- be- real inner child out to play.
He doesn’t care a shit about framing or lighting. He sees Mickey Mouse where the Aesthete sees walls to paint. He goes for love and wonder hunt and I should follow him more often in his shy, yet powerful desire to begin now, again, all over, from pure scratch.

What you are hearing as you look at the image is not the ravenous voice of hunger, speaking out loud, working its way through the thick layers of repression. Mommy wants you to be a good boy, but she is becoming weaker than a whisper, and the new tone is the blunt, shameless, undomesticated manifestation of yourself, in a way you can see, in a way you can’t deny, in a way that moves you to action, although apparently benumbed and silent, giving you permission, opening the gates, letting out the flood.
Does it matter if it’s a poster of Lady Gaga’s next show or a girl without name at the door of a peep den? Does it matter if it’s London, Amsterdam or Madrid? Does it really matter if it’s dummy behind the windows of El Corte Inglés, or a wax figure at Madam Tussard’s?
It has worked, for the first time in your life. Better than a porno tape. Better than a Playboy. Better than Viagra. Better than Cialis. You walk faster, you reach and open the street door of your apartment building to finally make it through the craving with animal fruition, as she were going down, straddle legs, blossom red mouth, as she were the one moving your hands, your will, your loneliness, your appetite for love. A voice stronger than your mother’s. Alluring, provoking, mouth watering, juicy, irresistible. A voice in black and white. Speaking all the things forbidden and dirty.
Only for you.

“She might have been a beauty in her thirties”. “Well, she is still a beauty”, I thought.
Five seconds after she had vanished among the crowd, with her Channel-like hat, her self-contained elegance, her glamorous, yet casual summer outfit, holding a pair of expensive sandals with one hand and classic sun glasses with the other. Small feet barely walking on the grass, turning the head around to smile one last time. Flirty, delicate, somewhat melancholic.
“Have you seen a forty-something fair lady with a fancy hat and sandals in her hand?” I asked one of the betters with binoculars, who was noisily cheering and shouting on one of the horses in the race. He didn’t even hear me.
I looked around again but didn’t see her.
“You are not supposed to be sad at your own death” she whispered, while looking straight to the camera. I swear. I can’t let go of this strange feeling that she expected me to do something more than taking a photo.
Who knows.

It was Henri Bergson who wrote that the eye only sees what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
I think that the eye is only blessed by true beauty when the heart is ready to receive (and honor) whatever comes up, either if it’s beautiful or not.
There’s a powerful analogy between photography and love. The more I love, the better I see, the better I catch up the marvel moment, the brighter reality shows up on paper and screen.
I felt the horses galloping over my head, and the intense smell of dung and grass all over the racecourse. The sun was hitting vertical on the tracks and the noise of the hoofs from ground level waved electric through my body like an approaching stampede. I was totally in awe, riding my high, feeling so alive, so receptive, eager to absorb the moment and never let it go.
I’m not one of those people who go in raptures often. I’m quite latent, quite unaroused, secretly and silently passionate.
How much I owe to the woman who opened me up to this kind of bewilderment, striking truth into the eyes I now resist to shut.
It impresses me to no end the capacity of her presence to change my filters, to domesticate time and light in behalf of a clearer perception, to change the trajectory of my artistic purpose, to put my fears on hold, to make me proud of myself (as capable of love her in return, as deserving of her company), to encourage me to risk beyond comfort zone, turning all things threatening into potentially warmhearted, welcoming, hospitable ones, by melting my suits of armor and giving me my curiosity and my adventurous drive back.
I went into the shower, pleasantly tired of living fully. Just like a kid or a lover.