Mexican Pictures

"Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts." -- Octavio Paz "All is visible and all elusive, all is near and can't be touched" -- Paz Over the past nine years, I've been photographing extensively in Mexico -- a mysterious place that presents itself as tangible and potent, but is always drifting just out of reach. Images seem to appear suddenly and for only a moment, a passing glance out of the corner of the eye, a brief glimpse of what will always remain largely hidden. Seeing such images is like stumbling upon some sort of beautiful archaeological artifact. Mexico is full of these artifacts. They're made visible in anonymous and unforeseen ways, as if in gaps left open in the layers of past and present, layers of solitude, loneliness and stoicism. They emerge dusted and tinted by those layers, and when I'm able to see them, I try to make pictures there.