Angeles

The seed for these pictures was planted in me many years ago, when a young boy, came to me and startled me with an unaffected gaze. He stood like a wall in front of me and said, "Who are you and what do you want?" After several uncomfortable moments of averting his gaze I gave him an answer that satisfied him; not the real answer, and he left.

Some time afterwards with more miles and maturity under my belt, I came to understand that the boy merely reflected back to me my own angst. I also understood that anytime we meet someone, one way or another, we ask the same questions: "Who are you?" and "what do you want?" Until those questions are answered no relationship is possible. We also ask ourselves these questions throughout our lives at various stages and at varying degrees, and no one reaches real maturity without asking these questions.

The next time I recognized the same gaze was in Santa Cruz, Oaxaca where the village had gathered to celebrate the first communion of some of its children. This time there were several unassuming, unaffected gazes falling on me, the only stranger, and I began to make pictures one frame at a time with a painful anxiety that this opportunity would disappear, that someone would yell at me, "Hey you, stop that!" and their magic would disappear. None did. Click, wind, click, wind, and sweat. "Just one more God, just one more." Click! When it was over a priest came to me and asked, "Who are and what do you want?"

As a story-teller I see a narrative in everything in much the same way that many native cultures believe that everything has a spirit. Consequently my work is about the internal life of people. On a deeper level I seek in my subjects, as a Zen monk put it, "the face you were born with"; a moment of the unassuming authenticity that transcends the timeliness and self-consciousness of our existence.

I see with the same eye, whether I am shooting an annual report or documentary photography, I am seeking the unexpected, a moment, a whisper from inside that shows me what has been obscured by our understanding of the world.

Cuba

Once upon a time I lived and worked in Cuba; I married and wandered in Cuba. Always I was struck by the eloquence of the Cuban body language and lack of self consciousness. That extended to being photographed. They just looked right through me like I wasn't there often.

In Cuba every breath is a sigh and every glance a wink; every movement a gesture.

I Dream of going back before it changes.

Plan de Ayala

Plan de Ayala, is adobe houses and thatched roofs, hand-hewn boards, blood feuds, red corn and family ties. It is a story of a small Mexican Indian village where I lived for a time and spent every penny I had to complete the experience I had dreamed of doing since I was a boy. To live in a Mexican pueblo where the old ways of my great grand parents still predominated.

Plan de Ayala is in the Mexican state of Chiapas and had been part of a feudal agricultural system until 1959 when its feudal landowner was shot dead by angry villagers. Until then the reforms of the Mexican revolution were largely ignored in Chiapas because of the state's remoteness.

The church there was owned and built by the hacendero (feudal land baron), all the land was owned by the hacendero, the stores were owned by the hacendero, if you sold your corn it was to the hacendero, and if you worked it was on the hacendero's land and for him.

What is left is a growing population trying to make a living on subsistence family farms that cannot support large families any longer. I arrived as the population was only just beginning to realize this and the economics of unsustainable land use, degraded environment and depleted resources had not yet rendered the paradigms of the past irrelevant. Communal land use, community & family ties still held the community together, although the region's forests had been clear-cut and the wild game had vanished.

This story largely reflects boyhood notions I held since listening to my mother's and grandmother's stories of a Mexico once upon a time. I stumbled onto the opportunity of living in Plan de Ayala quite suddenly and had no time to research but only to see and work from my first impressions.

Therefore I photographed its beauty and traditional ways before I learned of the strains that history and the world were placing on Plan de Ayala. I photographed people farming, celebrating, worshiping, fighting, mourning their dead and day-to-day life