I make photographs because I have to.

Not as a lifestyle. Not as an aesthetic. Because 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. My photographs are not about landscape, or people, or light. They are about the specific texture of not quite belonging — and the strange, quiet beauty that lives in that space.

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

This is not nostalgia. It is resistance.

Photography has become the most mass-produced medium in human history. Billions of images made daily — processed by machines, optimised for algorithms, consumed in seconds and forgotten. The soul has gone out of it. The darkroom is where I go to bring it back. Alone in the dark, with chemistry and light and my hands, I make something that could not have been made any other way, by anyone else, at any other moment.

That singularity matters to me. It is the whole point.

My eye was shaped by a decade working as a Location Manager on film productions — The Batman, Mission: Impossible, Beetlejuice — learning to read space, light, and narrative possibility in the physical world. My printing has been refined alongside Adrian Ensor, twice awarded the Ilford Master Printer Award, one of the finest darkroom printers in the UK. 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 am building a darkroom and lab in London. I am teaching. I am printing.

The work continues.