about
many cultures, one world
What I try to achieve in my photographs is the immediacy and intimacy of the moment. I’ve always loved to watch people, trying to catch a glimpse of just one instant, frozen in time, of their constantly moving and infinitely varied lives. With luck we can get a hint of the universal through the unique. We’re all so different and all so similar at the same time.
This collection of photographs goes back just over 50 years. The earliest two were taken in 1969 in the homes of two families living in a small town in southern Mexico, Mitla, in the state of Oaxaca, where my sister had been living for a time. The actual negatives have been lost to time. What you see are the digitized copies of photographs of the prints that had been hanging on my sister’s wall for all those years.
I feel I’ve had the distinct privilege of knowing each of the people that appear in these photographs, although in most cases our paths crossed for not much more that a few seconds. They were either totally unaware of my existence or they saw me and were either happy (sometimes overjoyed) or unhappy (sometimes angry) to be photographed by a perfect stranger.
With a few notable exceptions, this is the first time I’ve shown these photographs to anyone. I hope you enjoy them.
Michael