I Dry My Hair in the Wind

GETTING CLOSER TO
WHAT WE DON'T SEE

For me, documentary photography isn't just about showing reality. It’s about getting closer to what we don't see, to what lies beyond our immediate gaze, to those things that are right there and yet, often, we don't know how to name. My way of looking is born from that place: as a search for the real, but also for the deeply human.

On February 19, 2015, I arrived, almost by chance, at a children's home in Oaxaca, Mexico. I had a camera in my hand and a twenty-kilogram backpack on my back. Without knowing it, I also carried a willingness to let myself be transformed by an experience that would end up changing me profoundly.

From the very first moment, I connected with the girls. There was curiosity, vulnerability, strength, and joy in them. A way of being in the world that, even in the midst of difficult circumstances, kept an intact truth. That encounter was the beginning of a bond that would stay with me.

EIGHT YEARS
LOOKING FROM WITHIN

Born from that experience is I dry my hair in the wind, a project that is also a tribute to my mentor, Mary Ellen Mark, and an invitation to approach the universe of these girls from a different perspective. To question what we think we know. To look more closely.

For nearly eight years, I returned, observed, and listened. Little by little, I built a relationship of trust that allowed me to approach their world from the inside. I didn't want to photograph from a distance, but from a place of closeness. I didn't want to focus on their circumstances or what they lacked, but rather to discover everything they were.

Their games, their friendships, their dreams, their silences. Their fragility and their strength. Their small, everyday gestures and that form of authenticity and spontaneity that we adults recognize somewhere deep in our memory, even if we have often lost it along the way.

From that shared time comes an intimate narrative in which image and word intertwine. Black and white focuses the gaze on the essential: the faces, the gestures, the bonds, the atmosphere. There is no desire to provoke pity or to build a story based on loss. The girls are not defined by their circumstances, but by the life they build every day.

A WAY
TO GIVE BACK

From that first meeting, I felt that even though they seemingly had nothing, they were actually giving me everything.

Over the years, I dry my hair in the wind has transcended photography itself. Through the sale of books and photographic prints, the project has helped fund improvements for foster homes, turning a part of what I received into a way to give back.

Because photography can bring us closer to realities we don't know and transform the way we see. And, sometimes, it can also help change them.

Feel their wind.