Self Portrait (the beginning)

There was a day when the question ceased to matter. I constructed an elementary space: light positioned according to an intuition that had never truly abandoned me. I placed myself before the camera, engaged the remote shutter, and the mechanism articulated its small mechanical affirmation.

What emerged from that frame was not a document of recovery, but something more subtle: an awareness. The person reflected in that image was not a restoration of who I had been. Rather, the photograph registered a threshold, the precise moment when I recognized that my experience. Lived through this particular body, through this particular rupture, contained within it a language that demanded articulation. A visual language. Mine alone.

In that single exposure, I understood that I could be a photographer again. Not in continuation, but in renewal. That the accident had not erased my capacity to see and to make. It had, instead, furnished me with a subject of irreducible specificity: the lived geography of survival itself.

This photograph has been graciously loaned from the private collection of Tomás Bautista and Juan Carlos Ajenjo to become part of the project AQUÍ, conceived, executed, and curated by Andrés Isaac Santana.

70 by 50 cm. print of “Self Portrait”