On the Traces of My Twenty-Year-Old Self
In 2025, forty years after my first journey across the United States, I undertook a solo road trip following the traces of my twenty-year-old self.
This project was born from the desire to confront memory with reality: to revisit places once crossed in youth and observe what remained — both in the landscape and within myself.
Along forgotten roads, I encountered abandoned gas stations, obsolete car washes, damaged highways, empty motels, and people living on the margins of society. These altered spaces reveal a fragile and disenchanted America, marked by time, economic decline, and human vulnerability.
At the same time, returning to New Mexico reawakened the intense emotional connection I had experienced decades earlier. Crossing its border once again, I felt the same inexplicable spark, as if the territory carried a memory beyond personal experience.
The series moves between documentary observation and inner journey. The landscapes become emotional territories where past and present coexist.
Although I work digitally, my practice preserves the discipline of analog photography. I photograph sparingly, without reviewing the images during the journey and without retouching them afterward. This process allows intuition, distance, and rediscovery to remain central to the work.
My photographic practice is rooted in walking, travel, and attentive observation. I approach places as emotional landscapes rather than documentary subjects, seeking moments where light, space, and silence reveal an inner narrative.
I am drawn to transitional spaces — thresholds, roads, waiting areas, and fragile gestures — where movement and stillness coexist. Through my work, I seek to create poetic correspondences between landscape and human experience, inviting viewers to project their own memories, journeys, and beginnings into the images.
A photograph taken in Gallup, New Mexico.In October 2025.
