State of Mind is a project which emerged from trips around the world and as a personal narrative coming out of the places and people I encountered along the way.
It is about the "thinking moments" and the individual quality of mysterious strangers.
I have been living with most of these photos in my head for a long time and this project has been growing and taking shape in the most organic way imaginable.
The “State of Mind” series has been formed slowly and it was the subject of my interpretation from time to time.
Coming to live in Japan was the first step of committing myself to organizing this collection of images and to go through notebooks and travelogs to remember the exact feelings and routes I was taking.
Throughout these travels I had a feeling of how everything is transitory and constantly changing without any set of visible rules. I also got the confirmation that travelling is as important in my life as creating: it brings back this huge strength from feeling free and capable of making choices based on instincts.
In a nutshell, what I came to realize through all these photos is that I have a visual pattern of recognizing silent moments - without any kind of verbal communication - around me.
I like to observe, taste the atmosphere and imagine the life of a person standing in front of me that I do not know. I feel strongly connected to unknown people and their stories, most of the times they are the ones with best advices.
Paying attention to gestures, clothes and mannerisms just puts me in awe.
These photographs are about those transitory moments and encounters – the “thinking moments” of the people I see. Inside their heads their can be inner turmoil or just abstract feelings being organized. We will never really know. And that’s the beauty of it: not knowing what people are actually thinking or going through.
When paying attention to the expressions emerging from contemplation and solitude there is a great deal of learning coming out from that simple observational process. This emotional empathy and transitory aspect is what triggers my curiosity in observing people, and of course taking photographs.
As a paradox to the hammering rhythm of society and urban settings, images help me understand my surroundings and freeze the body and thoughts of the people I encounter.
What really interests me in these solitary moments of disconnection is the latent possibility for something to happen. There’s a possibility for the unknown to surface. And that’s fascinating and mysterious and inspiring altogether.
What attracts me is not exactly so much the people per se but their sense of individuality. There is something very magical about these moments. When someone is thinking or alone there’s a particular poetic quality about their atmosphere. There is of course social alienation and solitude but there is also a sense of inner respect. Of not letting oneself get flushed away by the urban ocean and that’s very admirable.
I have noticed we tend to get into a reflective state of mind specially while travelling. When the body is stuck in an airplane, car or train, the mind finds space to run away into distant thoughts. I’ve also realized while editing this book that in many aspects these series of photographs are about loneliness. Loneliness as an option or as a condition. Ultimately this was also a discovery for me since most photos were done while I was travelling alone or dealing with my own rhythm or looking for some sort of resolution at that time. I guess I can say photography is a great self-analysis tool. It’s an enormous help to understand how logic, memory and instinct work so closely together.
The pictures herein were taken in various cities of Spain, Portugal, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Ukraine, South Korea, Romania, Russia and Hungary between 2009 and 2013. The cities and people are different but I strongly see a cohesive narrative. I’m interested in reflecting this inexplicable certainty in which we all live different lives yet still somehow we all look the same. Not just the people but also the social conditions, the ambience of the streetlights or simply our profound nature and expressions.
I hope you can look at these pictures and connect at some level with the people, situations and moods.
This is my outside view from each particular state of mind.
The photo book from this series can be acquired thru my website at: http://nmphotos.org/
