Once, my brother and I got 35 mm cameras in a "happy meal" from a Colombian chain restaurant called Kokoriko. One was red and the other was yellow. I still keep them and that’s where my relationship with photography started.
During my secondary school years, I met Miss Lim. She taught me the basics and encouraged me to explore while giving me photography magazines, discussing ideas on how to take better pictures and the meaning of taking them. We both thought I would become a landscape or wildlife photographer, due to my love for nature. At that time, I took pictures of all the people I knew at school because they were my most accessible subjects. I think that must have been the moment when my connection with the topic of memory began, because I dedicated myself to it: capturing memories intensely. Afterwards, the way I related to all of that was gradually transformed, searching in other places, like in architecture.
At seventeen I debated between sculpture and photography. I embarked on a life in the Great Apple. By day I explored the world of sculpture in The New York Institute of Fine Arts, by night I explored black and white photography in the International Center of Photography. While developing my first roll of film, surrounded by darkness while I listened to the CD of the Broadway musical, The Lion King, I fell deeply in love with the magic and mysticism of the analogue process: developing and blowing up an image. That moment still takes my breath away, witnessing how an image appears from what a moment ago looked like nothing under a red light. A process filled with surprise. I can let months or years pass until I see the results. Because of all of this, photography became part of me. These experiences and themes have become important pieces in my exercises and photographic work: memory, the city, my relationship with presence and absence, the people who have passed through my life.
Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to reinforce my discourse and to study different areas of photography and cinema. Currently I live in Bogota where I dedicate my time towards creating visual content alongside a friend with whom I formed a photography collective that focuses more on the commercial area and working on my personal photography projects, searching for other meanings and questions in them, artistic and existential ones. The darkroom is still very present in my life; it’s where I let myself be most amazed.
