Caminos

In my youth my dreams drove me to standing up for justice. Pablo Neruda was my favourite author. Neruda’s poems continue to strongly resonate in my mind. There is no path – ningún camino – without dreams. Today – more than four decades later – I continue to dream. My Caminos have become my dreams.

Protected by the lenses of my camera I have tried to project what I saw.

Isn’t it that we project our dreams in what we see? Or is it the other way round: we dream what we project? It does not matter. Both ways are valid.

Caminos is a small collection of dreams. It’s the collective – and occasionally lonely – way of the penguins.

It’s the long and far-reaching flight of the petrels.

I also included in Caminos the bad dreams of the girl (Camino triste) at the Mapocho river in Santiago de Chile.

Camino del escape leaves the answer open: is the Camino heading out of the city or into the city of angels? Of course, it’s both.

Contradictory dreams are reflected in the three photographs in the Puna.

They extend from the emptiness of Tolar Grande to the beauty and the power of nature.

Camino al mar faces the Pacific. From there you have thousands of kilometres of ocean to get to the other side of our planet, to Brisbane. On your back you are well protected by the Andes, the Amazonian Forest and the Atlantic.

Camino del agua is a pre-Inca water channel on the East-West water divide at an altitude of approximately 4’000 meters: a human effort to try to control water streams.

Camino del viraje and Camino de las curvas try to display the power of the mountains with our personal path and struggle at each curve.

Emociones en el camino and Camino en el túnel reveal the insignificance of human efforts.

Camino de los dioses is an attempt to represent the beauty of the moment at the “sacred lake” the Titicaca Lake: the home of the Inca gods.

The sunset at a lost town in northern Argentina – Fiambalá – projects the steady and recurring camino of our dear sun. Caminos is ultimately a humble perspective on the path of the indescribable beauty of what our planet keeps offering us. Let’s protect it. We need it.

Our planet does not need us.

All the proceeds of the Caminos photo exhibition go to the following organization:

MDG, Maison de la Gare Saint-Louis association pour les enfants talibés, Saint-Louis, Sénégal

MDG, Maison de la Gare, an organization for the talibé children, Saint Louis, Senegal (mdgsl.com)