I’m pretty sure that the eyes are erogenous organs and erogenous zones. They touch, they taste, they talk, they sing, they smell love and danger, they reach the untouchable, they give a name to all things left behind and disowned, they build cathedrals of meaning and they are the supreme artists of inquiry.
I love so much and so dearly the foreign worlds you bring to mine, naked from noise and clutter so I can touch them through this window of phobic convalescence, and let them in and touch me in spite of ancient terrors and disturbing memories, in spite of my reluctance to let myself be touched and embraced. I so much appreciate the simplicity of your glance, free from any intention to sell anything, and I have been privileged to be the fugitive voice of all those strangers, and most of all, to play your voice for a while, as if I were you doing the click, or even better, as if we were doing it together as a team.

My whole vision of the world has changed along sixteen weeks of walking your eyes, instead of your shoes. And it has changed forever.

Thank you for this bewildering joyride.
From the bottom of my heart.

Paz Puente Greene

From the bottom of my heart.

I have a real soft spot for some strangers that look straight into my eyes and cry for help without a word, without a tear, without stopping to say ‘hey, you, I’m completely lost and screwed up, let’s share a beer, come on, I’ll pay the drinks… Don’t know where to start, let’s say I’ve been fired from my job, some days I want to kill my wife and cut my children to pieces, but I’m a good guy, so I will probably shoot my head off with my brother’s gun.’
Neither of us stop, I go home as if someone had hit me with desperate eyes in the middle of the stomach and food tastes bitter and I somewhat pray for my work to be like one of those cardiopulmonary reanimation devices of emergency rooms and ambulances. One capable of shocking almost dead lives into hope or into wonder or into awareness or indignation or into sweetness, or into love, or into innocence or into each other. Again.

As a photographer, I’ve come to realize that certain emotions are invisible to eyes in immediate reality, but they appear, so uncanny familiar, so violent, so touching, once revealed in a photograph. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be if I couldn’t keep record of the overlooked, if I couldn’t stay a minute mindfully, compassionately connected with all the disowned selves of mine that show up in brief encounters, in relationships of no more than half of a minute.
What would my life be like if I couldn’t touch the spent threads of the past interweaved in the silken clothes of present. What kind of person would I be, unaware of the subtle evidence of human suffering meeting me at the borders of a shot?
Photography lets me feel the chill of winter on the skin and in the soul of strangers, and gives me a glimpse of their lives as a whole. It makes me aware and pushes me through the thickness of thought, more open, more available, much more tender and humble. And most of all, more careful and insightful, both qualities without which no photographer can evolve to what others call genius, and I suspect it’s the consistent choice to follow inner truth and inner knowingness, wherever they take us, whatever the moment we are meant to freeze so others can seize what really happens, what really happened and even foretell what is about to happen, beyond any attempt of self-definition.

(*) Quote by Theodore Roethke.

I humbly and faithfully cherish a lodge of mentors, most of them gone: the tutelary spirits of photography. One of the members of this lodge is Robert Capa, who said that if a photo is mediocre or lifeless, you weren’t close enough. That’s the reason why I often cross the same line that cross stalkers, voyeurs and exhibitionists.
I’m a shy, discreet man, but the need to capture life naked and off guard gives me the arrogance, the boldness, the immodesty necessary to do my best with the only precious talent I think I’ve got.