IN ABSTRACT

Sometimes abstraction is there, unnoticed by most people, but when I walk down the street, I make a point of looking for "it" too—and I mean the shapes creating things, the shadows creating forms, the simple revealing its complexity, the everyday transfiguring into subtle strangeness. After all, abstraction is as much a part of street photography as anything else. When I take these kinds of photos and when I process them later, I always remember the words of my art teacher from my second year of high school. Her name was Nilda, and she was a friend of my mother's. She even looked after me in the afternoons while my mother worked an extra shift as a teacher. So, for a while, besides being her student, I was also part of her family. And my teacher would say something like this about abstraction: "Everything has something abstract about it when you look at it closely and attentively," and that phrase has stayed with me ever since, because even before I started taking photographs, abstraction was something that powerfully captivated me. So, in a way, these photos that I'm going to share with you in this post speak to my relationship with this kind of creative movement and way of seeing the world...