Biography

I was born in Cuba and grew up in Mexico City.  While growing up in Mexico City, we lived very near to an art house movie theatre and I used to sneak out late at night and watch all of this great foreign movies with directors like - Fellini, Bunuel, Antonioni and Kubrick.  There was nothing else in this world I wanted to do more than to be behind a film camera.  When I was 18 years old, I had an accident and lost vison on my right eye.  At that time, I felt my dream of being a cinematographer was over.  I took up photography because I thought it was my only choice to being behind a camera.  I graduated from Brooks Institute of Photography and I started a commercial and fashion photography carrier.

I worked in Mexico City, New York and San Francisco, I learned so much from working with amazing professionals, from lighting and composition to storytelling with a single image.   More importantly, I learned not to place limitations on myself.  I realized that you have to fight for your dreams and decided that one eye was all I needed to look through a viewfinder to create images.  I sold all of my photography equipment and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a Cinematography career. 

For the next twelve years, I worked on feauture films and documentaries in Los Angeles.  We also lived in Hawaii, where our son Lucian was born.  We now reside in San Juan Island since 2017.



Artist Statement

I am still very involved in the "digital world"  but to me being able to go back in time, and immerse myself in this process, how it was done 100 years a go, it has become an obsession, and in a way it has liberated me from the never ending progress of digital photography, were it is all about, resolution, pixels and image capture, and it has forgotten about the personal communication between the photographer and the person being photographed, the stories you capture on this very raw format are not fleeting, and living in a cloud, but they are real, and when you sit in front of the camera for a 4 second or longer exposure, there is more of you in that image that is capture on the plate, than 100 fast digital photos taken of you.


Using Format