ARTIST STATEMENT

I have been interested in photography since I was young. I learned from a friend to use 35 mm cameras and to develop and print in black and white in the darkroom. For more than thirty years I have worked with pinhole cameras (lenseless). Artist Carlos Jurado, one of the pioneers of this type of photography in México, taught me to build and use these cameras in Veracruz, in the late 1980s.

The technique allows me to express myself creatively in a singular language, different in depth and with a horizon that gives flight to the gaze and identity to the objects. Many of my photographs represent the intimate world in which I move, “the unusual everyday” said Kati Horna, a photographer of Hungarian origin settled in México, of whom I was a student from 1985 to 1986.

From 2014 to 2016 I had a grant from the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (National System of Art Creators) to do a project entitled: Un diario estenopeico (A Pinhole Diary). From 2020 to 2022, I got it again with a project called Árboles ancestrales de Veracruz  (Ancestral Trees of Veracruz). Both works with these cameras.

I have also dedicated myself to capture the daily life of Nature, and I photograph it with these simple devices that allow great approaches to objects, interventions in long exposure times and interesting deformations, among other effects.

In a certain way my work is closer to the work of the pioneers of photography, but I intend to project a contemporary vision in which a technical process of the 19th century is mixed with digital techniques of the 21st century. And I always make a record of my photographic work with a digital camera.

I take my images with photographic film that I develop in the darkroom, make contact sheets and print in small formats on gelatin silver. I also scan and edit my photos on the computer, and I make use of sophisticated digital printing methods to make medium and large format prints when I am going to show my work or to have an exhibition.

Photograph by Héctor Juárez, 2016.