Ingeborg Portales Marino

I am from Cuba. My grandfather and my father loved photography and I inherited their cameras, a Contessa and a Kiev. In the 1990s, I was able to get hold of a used Nikon FM2 in Havana.
My first daughter was born in Lima and my second daughter was born in Miami. I’m from those places too. I take photos while raising daughters, or the other way around. It is a dual occupation that looks simple, includes routines that end up producing photos - mostly street photos - and inevitably results in my daughters growing up. For me photography is not a ritual of preserving instants but of finding meaning in them, despite whatever doubts I have as I take photos and raise my daughters.
My photos always tell a story, or that is what I’m aiming for. I’m not interested in them being technically perfect. It’s fantastic if any of them are. But no, what I care about is narrating. And that’s why I think street photography works, even for portraits. As a photographer, I establish connections with my characters. My photographs are incomplete, I carry those characters in an image which is definitely not reality but in general prompts me to want to know more about them.