Who am I when I photograph and who am I in a photograph? What are my daily rituals and where do they come from? How am I shaped by history and family? How do I channel and record energy that comprises my psychic being?

I am an immigrant — born in El Salvador and raised in a bilingual home in NYC. I’ve always felt a yearning to belong, alongside a persistent feeling of being caught in-between places, languages, and even contradictory senses of self. My work focuses on documenting these states, mental and physical, as well as the transitions that take me towards them and away. Through my visual diary I search for moments of magic and sacredness that is often expressed through symbolism and is meant to be seen but also felt. What are the mystical and invisible connections that unite me with the world?

If unconditional love is the awareness that we are worthy to be loved simply because we exist then this love allows us to have compassion because we recognize ourselves in each other through our deep interconnectedness. I seek to make that love visible and imprint it into being.

Photographing becomes an invocation, a cleansing, a ritual, a resurrection, a portal, all leading to understanding more deeply what that love is. Through ritual and activation or conversing with light and using the camera as a tool of invocation, this project is a search for these connections outside of the self but ultimately deeply embedded within.

My photographs don’t necessarily provide answers, but instead offer up a visual map capacious enough to include all these different places and states of being. Themes of transience are countered by recurring engagement with the elements that ground us: earth, water, air, fire, ether, the body and, especially, light — my only constant companion. This light is my true home. In these in-between states, these luminous transitions, my photographs are born.