I think I hate cameras. Maybe that's the reason I started to take

photos, long time ago (too many years ago): to be on the other side.

The aversion persists, anyway. There is only one camera: the eye.

Anything else is pointless and redundant. I strongly distrust people

who disgress about photographs, and even more those who explain

exposure or diaphragm lens opening.

I use what I find on hand. I always forget to say I'm sometimes

stylish, but it's an accident, not on purpose. Sometimes, I see (feel)

myself as a photographer. I am, but being humble seems more

appropriate.

Some days ago I had an idea. It maked sense: Photography starts where it ends.

Intentional beauty accidents

A face is a border. An object is a border. A space is demarcated by borders. The greatest accomplishment of a photographer is to help the one who looks to get to the other side, to obtain a fleeting but memorable certainty of connection and intimacy.

Discretion is his most valuable gift, as well as the invisibility that lets him be not the camera, but the object, not the focus, but the face, not the lens but the sparkle in the eye.

Vision remains in love with the moment and gives an answer to questions unmade. Most of critics jump to terminology -angle, approach, contrast, ambient light, saturation, sensitivity...-before the photo can speak by itself.

I take photos just to hear the other voices, those that were not heard before the click, those that are no longer audible after it.

A photo is not a straight translation of reality, it's not an image in the album of a Japanese tourist, impregnated of sprint-tour-angst. It's not like the thread of Ariadna to the memory, nor a glamorous object on the wall. And of course, it's not the name of the photographer, nor an echo of his human voice. Eye and voice are only mediums of a parallel reality, so different from the one which we are involved with.

Beyond any aesthetic or style premise, just like a zen discipline, I long to be the silence that makes the moment itself to happen, in a state of mindfullness and awareness.

My photos want to be unpretentious, small, delicate urban haikus. Offerings on the altar of the present and also lines of a hand in which fate is about to be written.

Everything else is an excuse to collect the world, as Susan Sontag wrote in her unique essay on photography. Intimate evidence. Possession of the one who looks, not the photographer.

Creo que odio las cámaras fotográficas. Por eso, hace ya demasiados años, comencé a tomar fotografías; para estar al otro lado. En cualquier caso, la aversión permanece. La única cámara posible es el ojo, todo lo demás es accesorio. Desconfio de aquellos que explican las imágenes y más aún de los que hablan de aperturas de diafragmas y exposiciones.

Utilizo la que tengo a mano. Y algo muy importante que siempre olvido: no tengo estilo. Bueno, a veces si; pero es sin querer. También, en ocasiones, me considero fotógrafo. Lo soy, pero es mejor ser modesto, siempre es mejor.

Hace unos días se me ocurrió una frase ingeniosa: "La fotografía comienza donde termina".

"Buying a Nikon doesn't make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner."

Anonimus