My 30 Photographs Documenting Daily Life Amidst San Francisco's Residents And Workers

My journey as a photographer began when I viewed B&W and color glamour photos from all the early magazines of the late 1960s, mostly from Look, Time, Vogue, and Life magazines. It was an art form and an environment that I would have loved to be a part of. But, the decisive moment that pushed me in the direction of photography was glancing at a photograph by Garry Winogrand that was featured in a Life Magazine article. I was completely amazed at how he was able to combine the complexities and the realities of human nature and combine the aesthetics of form and content in a single image. Then and there I thought to myself, where do I start, and how do I pursue a life in photography?

Before I begin the day I think of the neighborhood I want to explore that day and go from there. I kind of start off slowly in my approach, sort of like a baseball pitcher warming up, and slowly intensify as I walk through the neighborhood streets.

When I began photographing, I usually took a few photos just to get a feel of the people and environment around me and then pushed myself to focus on what I think would make a good image and what a particular subject may look like after I photograph them. The subjects that attracted me the most were the people who stood out the most in the situation (environment) they were in at the time, their character, and their uniqueness. Every day was always an exploration of humanity and a learning experience, and that for me was always exhilarating. 

The most challenging part of my creative process was the capacity to control my mental courage that I had to overcome when lifting my camera to my eye and photographing a complete stranger and being vulnerable to their responses. There are times I asked for permission and most of the time I couldn’t because that moment would have passed away and lost forever. The challenge was to know when to ask and when to not to ask. Sometimes I failed and other times I overcame the challenges with success. Sometimes I would just photograph just to get a feel for the people's response, which helped me build up my confidence to really start to move closer and closer to my subjects without drawing attention to myself in the process. Achieving my goals at the end of the day made me proud of myself and gave me the confidence I needed to continue my art form as a photographer.

What makes me passionate about street photography is the ability to stop and document a single frame of time and unify it with a form of aesthetics of my personal vision. I find my photographs to be a memory that will eventually be lost in time of who we are as a people, our individuality, character, and our experience of being human at this particular place in time in history as I was a part of.