"Night Shift" Photograph - Limited Edition of 8

"These photographs are more than just a documentary however, they are an expression of individual travel around the world…..the unique cultural imagery conveys a deep documentative and authentic aesthetic…..his distinct cropped surfaces with strong, concentrated compositions leave a lasting impression…" Series 9 : New Curatorial Review - Michael Hanna, Curator and Editor, Aedra Fine Arts Publishing.

I was born on a Tuesday at 10.40 in the morning in San Juan de Dios Hospital, Manila, the capital of the Philippines. 

Henry R. Luce, in the 1936 original prospectus for what became LIFE Magazine, wrote: “To see life; to see the world; to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.” The photographers who worked for LIFE Magazine and Picture Post sparked my initial interest in going to college and becoming a photographer.

The area of photography that primarily interests me is documentary photography and an early training in journalism has always informed a more outward looking approach. If forced to put a label on myself, I describe myself as a documentary/fine art photographer.

Both with my commissioned as well as with my personal photography, I have worked on location. Being in a studio doesn’t energise or excite me. I enjoy the quality of exploration and discovery you experience with location work, coupled with sometimes unpredictable and changing light and weather and, of course, also with the variety of people you might encounter. After over 50 years in photography, it still gives me a thrill when I find and make an image and all the unpredictability, light and weather is on my side.

Following a period of personal turbulence and upheaval at the beginning of the 2000s, I determined to change the direction and purpose of my photography and in 2007 and 2008 I lived and travelled extensively in Cuba, resulting in the publication, in November 2009, of my first two photography books, ‘CUBA cubanas y cubanos’ and ‘Atados al Mar’.

One of the consequences of where I was born and of my early childhood is that I have never felt that I have any real roots anywhere. As a photographer, being rootless has been a benefit to me.