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Though I work as a photojournalist, I am primarily a documentary photographer. In my projects I tend to mix text and image in such a manner that the two narratives coincide but each has its own trajectory and integrity. A recent example of this is "El Camino de los Negros," an article about popular religion and its roots in slavery, published in Geográfica, with an online version to follow in October (www.revistageografica.com). Though both the images and the essay examined vodú and other religious rituals, they each had their own points to make and followed their own logic. I am also working on various "multimedia stories" that combine images in a slideshow accompanied by text and by sound (music, oral histories, ambient sound) in the manner of Eric Burns's documentaries. These multimedia stories can be viewed on the web or downloaded as podcasts, or viewed from a projector.

I took up the camera because there is no instrument more apt for capturing life on the run and for engaging with people's lives. Walter Benjamin's "spark of accident, of the here and now, with which reality has seared the subject" is what enlivens a photograph and creates narrative wealth. A good photograph tells many stories, but only if the photographer opens him or herself up to the object world. I am not interested in creating something original, but in discovering things that others see but do not heed. In that sense, I suppose my photographs are more like questions than answers.

Nor am I interested in what I can control or create out of my own fantasies. I choose to work with a camera precisely because I cannot entirely control what I record through its aperture. I can frame the scene, I can manipulate the film, I can do a variety of things, but the object world still resists my will and asserts its own autonomy. Every photograph I take has two authors.

Dominatrix

1994
Silver Halide Print
25 x 16

El Entierro

2002
Silver Halide Print
25 x 16

9/11:View from Battery Park

2001
Silver Halide Print
25 x 16

El Bautizo

2004
Silver Halide Print
25 x 16

Diana in the Meat Market

1992
Silver Halide Print
16 x 25