Documentary

My real passion is documentary photography.

I love telling stories that are worth to be told. Also, I know that when those stories reach the right people, you can help make a positive change in this world. I hope to be bless with that opportunity many more times in my life.

Right now I have one big documentary project in process.

Since my great-grandmother turned 100 in 2006, I started looking of other amazing centenarians to photograph them.

A simple portrait of a 100-year-old person tells the whole story of a life. The way they stand, where they sit, the expression in their face. These are amazing people that have challenged time and I want to make their presence in this world as permanent as photography allows it.

Maybe they received  some help from modern medicine to make it that long – like my great-grandmother did with her pacemaker – but there are other reasons to that achievement. Thanks to the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism and the Digital Diversity Fund that they grant me this past Fall, I will be doing a research on that matter in the next few months.

Also, I will be putting together a small documentary of centenarians in the San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco is my home right now and I want to honor its centenarian too. That should be done before Summer 2012 reach us.

Then, I want to go back to Costa Rica and find one hundred 100-year-old people and make a book with their portraits and a little bit of their inspiring stories.

I have already photographed 13 Costa Rican that are 100 or older. I have to find and photograph 87! That will be a big project, but when it will be done, it will be a dream come true!

Here is a link to a news organization that published the first few photographs of the centenarians at the beginning of 2011. In the near future I will have a video-documentary teaser and the research paper publish in a fund raising website where I will be asking people to help me fund this project. I hope you will be interested on helping me with that!