I make photographs because I have to.

For a long time I had no other way to say what needed saying. School told me I was thick. The arts weren’t offered where I came from. Words came slowly, if at all. But through a lens, through chemistry, through the slow emergence of an image in a tray of developer, something true could appear. Something that belonged entirely to me.

I’m part Chilean, part Welsh. I grew up between two languages, two cultures, two versions of belonging, and fully inside neither. That feeling of existing at the edge of a world rather than its centre never left me. It shaped how I look, where I stand, what I wait for. The pictures look like landscapes and people. What they’re really about is not quite belonging, and the quiet that comes with it.

I work entirely on film. I print everything by hand in the darkroom.

It isn’t nostalgia. It’s the only way I’ve found to make something that feels finished.

Most photographs now are made in a second and gone in another. A darkroom print takes hours, sometimes days. Every one I make is slightly different, and that’s the point.

My eye was shaped by a decade working as a Location Manager on film and television, including The Batman, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Bridgerton, learning to read space, light and narrative possibility in the physical world. I trained as a printer with Adrian Ensor, one of the UK’s most respected darkroom printers, and still print to the standard he taught me. These influences live in the work. So does everything else: the isolation, the dislocation, the 4am walks during a pandemic that dismantled everything and left only what was essential.

I now run Grain & Fibre, a darkroom in North London, where I print for other photographers and teach.