Common Diaries

I started about a month ago to shoot something that I've started to call the Common Diaries. I think that most of my shooting has to do with what everybody has in common with each other, what is universal about the human experience. When shooting nightlife, my usual reference is the lust for life, the apetite for more than what is possible that is at some point broken into by reality -a body too fragile and a place too decayed-. When shooting adolescence -in a series with the working title The Fountains-, what started as peering into a group that I'm not part of has turned more into a work on my own memories. I think that both the primordial lust for life and the melancholic recollection of adolescence are universal human experiences.

Common Diaries tries to be a visual diary of things experienced by anybody, sort of my diary minus me. It is common or shared or universal. It was seeded by a single image that I have been trying to follow, and it has been lending itself towards being evocative and graphical. I try to produce images that will have a strong texture and no central elements. Something like a visual puzzle that is a bit too obscure to have a solution, yet interesting to peer into. After a few days fully shooting and now checking the contact sheets, more and more ideas emerge, and I'm fully enjoying it. Not all the images are follow ups of the original anymore, although I hope they work at an interesting beat. It also has an enormous chance factor. I don't know about the look of the images nor I'm interested in them until I see them on the negative. That frees me some time to actually just enjoy, lay back, and go shooting.