Everyone has a different opinion on how you capture a photo but I think
it's the story behind that photo is what's most important, to me at least.
I'm there to listen first and then it's a matter of just watching
moments happen and knowing when it's appropriate and when it's not appropriate to
kind of take your camera out and photograph things, because
not everybody's there to be photographed. Some people feel like faces should be
blurred in the photographs. I'm not of that belief
so when I attend protests I tend to shoot it
in black and white just because I can control the contrast and the exposure a
little bit better than you can do on color to just
give that discretion to protesters but at the same time
not hide the work in any kind of way. But the color photographs for me are
to really put the subject on display, so like I'll have those color images
from like the Puerto Rican Day Festival where
I want to show the different styles, the clothes
the, the bright colors on the flag. It's all thoughtful.
At the end of the day I'm not attending these protests with the sole
purpose of photographing people and looking for that
shock value with my photographs. I'm there to see moments happen but I'm
mostly there to be a participant in the movement and then the photos come
with that. You have to be incredibly sensitive and at the same time you don't
want to just glamorize a protest. You have to showcase
for what it is and what it stands for. I am using two different cameras
which is the uh Fujifilm GA645 for my medium format
stuff because it's a little bit easier to
handle with, especially with a crowd, and my Nikon F3.
So if i want to get a wider kind of like pictorial frame i'll use my F3.
My initial inspiration was like Time magazine, Life magazine.
Gordon Parks Jamel Shabazz, Roy Decarava. Those were the
images that really like stuck with me. There's
something emotional about black and white photography.
Black and white is it for me, always forever, ever.
One of the things about the police photos
is that there's a personal connection with that because
half of my immediate family are in law enforcement. In our household
we have numerous conversations, heated conversations in regards to
like the relationship between communities of color and police officers,
which is an element i wanted to capture in those police officers photos is that
those police officers, you know, a good majority of them
are of color. It's a complicated relationship. Those images I really,
I really enjoy the most because it captures a lot of emotion from them
or lack of emotion. They definitely had like an us versus
you mentality. You can just read it in their eyes
Because as a portrait photographer you kind of like get the emotion
as to how people are feeling, so I was able to like see that like some people
feel angry, some people are sad, some people are confused, so I was able
to like capture that in the moment. I was shooting with my Fuji camera and then I
used like my presets to kind of like color grade it
to give it like an orange feel, to give it like a more of an old-school kind of
feel. So that was my main focus.
I approached
it the same way I shoot street photography
but it was it was definitely different in a sense where
you hear thundering loud voices and they're all
yelling to be heard, and it was just shocking, it was very intense to say the
least. I wanted to capture faces and capture emotion within the people
that I saw in the streets. Every face has a story to tell and I
wanted to capture that. I just like to load the role and just
shoot, shoot away.