Overlaps

My Photo scholarship 2011 entry

Before I first saw the Amazon Forest and the Andes from the plane going to Lima, I didn’t know what greatness meant. Obssessed about becoming whatever I dreamed I wanted to be, I had completely lost myself in a vicious cycle of failure and oblivion. I saw greatness in everyone around me, while I was stuck at being a bad mathematician.

I didn’t know then that, from that plane, I was only scratching the surface of greatness. To see it for what it actually is, I’d had to go deeper...

As a photographer, I learned that an unforgetable scenery is a hide place for where my photography really happens, for greatness itself not as a static image of something bigger than myself, but as Nature’s unspeakable power.

I found that, in the Andes, men cannot give in to a foolish ambition of overcoming nature’s limit. No. Their history is all about how the Incas lived in a profound symbiosis with the mountains, using technology not to fight against them, but to survive within their protection.

I learned to see myself as a part of that Nature, alive just as much as any moss or orchid. I could either accept that, and embrace the actual greatness of being a living thing, or fight against it, living outside my own body.

As I walked through the Salcantay Valley, I decided to embrace Nature, and my way of doing so was to dive into the amazing equilibrium between all beings, using my camera to capture this amazing instants of life. I tried to photograph the way Nature is actually a continuous function of time, always changing, always moving, always adapting. I wanted to show the way it always asks us the same unphatomable question: what is our place after all?