The Passing Frame
We have a compulsive need to pull shapes out of thin air, knowing perfectly well that nothing we make is going to last. I’ve been chewing on that contradiction since I was sixteen. I was sitting by myself along the Hudson River in Peekskill on a cool September afternoon. I had lived most of my life further down the water in Ossining, and only ended up in Peekskill for a year and a half before moving out to Puerto Rico, but the riverfront itself had always been my hiding place. I wasn’t doing anything important, but somewhere in that quiet, a thought settled into my head that I couldn’t shake: if everything eventually disappears, what is all of this actually for?
I dragged that question through decades of religion, philosophy, and science before I realized the camera had quietly become my primary way of wrestling with it. There is a concept in the opening of Genesis I’ve always appreciated—not necessarily as strict theology, but as a very accurate description of the creative process. First there is formlessness, just dark water, and then something moves. That is the best explanation I have for what walking with a camera actually feels like.
Most days I just let the crowd push me around the center and edges of the Zócalo or I hang near along Eje Central. The foot traffic is relentless, and I’m usually just drifting in the current until a specific face pulls me out of it. I’ve realized lately that the people who actually make me stop walking are almost always a generation or two behind me. I’m in my mid fifties now, so there is a distinct, awkward friction in stepping into the path of a stranger or couple in their twenties who might otherwise think I am out to sell them something. I just walk up and interrupt their momentum to ask if they mind letting me take a portrait. The camera acts as a physical excuse to bridge that gap. I’m not doing this to compile some grand documentary statement about youth and the people of Mexico City. Honestly, I’m just curious. I pull the camera up, dial in the focus ring, and wait to see how they look back at the lens as they reveal something about themselves in that fraction of a second.
I used to think I was collecting moments, but that is just another story photographers tell themselves to justify the compulsion. You cannot trap time. The photograph just leaves a physical mark proving that something happened, and that for a fraction of a second, I happened to be standing there paying attention. The actual friction happens afterward. Once the image exists, it stops belonging exclusively to me. It carries my subjective biases—where I chose to stand, what I actively cropped out—but it relies entirely on whatever memories and associations you bring to it when you look at it. You might recognize something in the frame I couldn’t even name.
The Passing Frame is not a gallery of answers. It is simply a space to lay out what catches my attention, whether that’s the images themselves, daily observations, or my attempts to untangle why I felt compelled to press the shutter in the first place. The human impulse to create might not be a grand mystery that needs solving. It might just be an ongoing, fluid conversation, and this is where I am choosing to have it.
in·spi·ra·tion
To be inspired is to breathe in—to take in the world and let it germinate something within us. Each breath fuels creativity, helping us shape something from nothing, to find rhythm and meaning in the chaos of life.
But to be truly inspired, we have to empty ourselves first—to acknowledge our limitations, to admit we don’t already know. After all, how can we learn if we think we already understand?
Inspiration flows from many sources—people, both living and long gone. I find it in nature, in music, in books and paintings, in conversations, and of course, in the work of other photographers.
Below is a list of those who have moved me and continue to. I hope you’ll explore their work when you get a chance. Who knows? Maybe something they saw, heard, or felt will speak to something in you, too.
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