While hitchhiking in the back of a pick-up truck in rural Guatemala I was asked by a local gentleman, “Por qué?” “Why do you take photos in a place like this?” I squirmed a bit, removed my straw hat—using it as a way of stalling a bit and looked inside it, as if the answer would somehow magically appear on the sweaty interior. My gaze left the hat and I looked up to seea small boy who’d been on this dusty truck just about as long as I, sitting quietly in the arms of his mother. In the boy’s face I saw him trying to figure out who I was from what he had seen on MTV, all the dubbed “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” re-runs he had seen on television, and from other travelers he had seen come before me. or my part, I saw in his face the emotions of earlier that morning, of yesterday, of last week, of last year,and I saw his emotions of tomorrow. I saw these things in the faces of everybody in the back of that truck. I turned back to the gentleman and with a wave of my hand told him that “this” was the reason.

There is a certain draw that one feels when encountering an event, a place, or a people that is vastly different from his/her own everyday events, places, or peoples. Our context that we normally use for understanding is not there, so we are resigned to use only what we see before us. We read the wrinkles on the brow; we read the gray in the moustache; we read the tiredness in the eyes; we read the work on the hands; we read the miles on the feet; and we read the beauty in the soul. This person is transformed from a series of actions into a mass of emotions, and we are transformedinto a hyper-sensitive being who is able to read someone not for how we know them to be, but for who he/she is to us. We avoid all of the everyday biases that we ingest and then regurgitate onto others as a labeling agent, and we see the essence, the pure feelings that one projects onto others, above and beyond the bias. We are by no means identifying who this person is, but by looking at them they may be identifying who we are. What touches us the most about this person? Why does or does not this person extract such an emotion from us? I wasn’t able to translate all of this into Spanish for the gentleman, but I think I did get the point across by saying, “En una cultura diferente, las personas pueden ver sus almas propias con mas claridad (In a different culture, people can see their own souls with more clarity).”

That is why I find myself in a strange, new environment every year with my camera slung over my shoulder. I am on a continuous quest to find out who I am by meeting others, people that are vastly different than me, but at the same time similar in the reflection of emotions and curiosity they see in my eyes.

The goal of my photography is to bring these unfamiliar faces and experiences to you, the viewer, here, in a more familiar environment. My hope is that through your viewing, you’ll find the connection in something that though possibly unfamiliar, is universal, an exploration of emotion, an exploration of self, something that will hopefully stay with you long after your eyes have left it.