“Granada, last refuge from a tiring life. Eternal garden, shows remnants of paradise that still remain, in only a few privileged places on earth.” - François-René de Chateaubriand

“In chaos, there is fertility.”

In the days after Governor Ricardo Rosselló resigned from office, #Renuncia protests continued at the Departamento de Justicia in San Juan, Puerto Rico. July 2019.

“Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.”  ― Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit

Just days after Governor Ricardo Rosselló resigned from office, celebrations consumed the streets of Old San Juan. Anti-Ricky graffiti covered the walls just as quickly as local residents volunteered to clean it up. Calle de Fortaleza, which had been renamed Calle de Resistencia by protestors, was still blocked by police. Most police officers watched stoically, but some couldn’t help but crack a smile. Just in front of the barrier blocking the path toward the governor’s mansion, locals covered the street corner. Salsa music poured from windows as people danced in the streets. Local artists set up canvas along the sidewalk. #Renuncia signs were still hoisted and loud bangs from drums and the clinking of pots and pans echoed down the cobble-stoned streets of Old San Juan.

"Florence's is a subtle beauty—its staid, unprepossessing palaces built in local stone are not showy, even though they are very large. They take on a certain magnificence when day breaks and when the sun sets; their muted colors glow in this light." - Fodors

My nose carried a sting inside it as I inhaled the early-morning Andean mountain air. It was as if the mountains themselves were saying to us, “you can stay and visit if you wish, but forget not that it’s only because we allow it.”

The town square held a handful of locals. A few early morning middle school lovers - the new kind of lovers- who couldn’t resist taking advantage of every spare second they shared together.

Some people ate their breakfast, some people contemplated their day, and some just took to the bountiful open space in the center of the winding side streets as a quick respite before they headed toward their daily obligations.

I passed a gigantic rectangular sign in front of the National police station, presented as a grid, each holding a wanted fugitive and their reward for capture. There was no way of me knowing who these people were, where they were from, or where they were now. But I felt grateful to not see my own image anxiously staring back at me.

I sat on a warming concrete bench, chewing coca leaves and watching the large stray dogs pass and play tag. My senses were consumed by car horns and foreign tongues, but I could only really think about the breakfast I could smell being cooked in the distance.

The altitude was enough to knock off my balance every time I stood up and lighten my head every time I turned a corner too quickly. But I welcomed it. It made me feel like I could drift away at any moment, just as easily as I drifted in.

This land of drifting wind.

Though we are this many miles from the sea, I wouldn’t stop to think twice if I saw a few natives hoisting a sail under this early morning, landlocked sun.

- Wanchaq District, Cusco, Peru. (Sept. 12, 2018)

"The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more; it is the history of heaven and earth." ― Benjamin Disraeli

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”  ― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Rome: the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.” - George Eliot

Incense smoke rises as pilgrims from all over the world enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; considerably one of the holiest sites in the world.

Enter the cathedral. Turn right. Climb the steep steps to the second floor. The ceiling is adorned with silver plated decorations. Thin orange wax candles scatter light throughout the dim space. The sparse light strewn throughout the room and bouncing off of the silver, bronze and brass, gives you the sense of a layered existence.

It’s as if you are blanketed by a sheet of reality, but holes torn in the fabric show layers of an ancient divinity peaking out from behind.

At the back of the room, just past an emblazoned image of the crowned-sun on the floor, is the site of the death of Jesus Christ. Pilgrims drop to their knees and crawl toward the exact point where his crucifix was planted, and pray.

Downstairs, the granite slab lay in front of the entrance. Some wept as they embraced the granite slab that has been set into the floor. This is the site where the body of Jesus Christ was cleaned and readied for burial.

Further, is the tomb, where he was finally laid to rest. For three days.

Regardless of faith, creed or denomination, there is something spiritual in this place. In these walls. Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s the history of it all.

Or maybe it’s the phenomenon of the human experience meticulously at work. Bringing all of the world to quiet, respectful genuflection.

The immense power of this space could lead even the most devout atheist to dip their finger in water and make the sign of the cross - from forehead to chest, from shoulder to shoulder.

- Christian Quarter, Old City, Jerusalem. (December 2018.)

I was in love before the airplane landed.

In a view from above, strong mountains stretched upward toward the sky and let their shoulders roll back down to their sides.

Thick mist seeped between the high altitude muscles of the Earth.

These streets are rich with life. Entire lines of generations occupy the same space of sidewalk concrete at any given moment. Children chase a torn and weathered grey ball, as it bounces between the shadows of cocina stands. A few feet away, their parents pinch tortillas off a flat, black-stone comal; with a touch that makes it seem like you could see generations of practice seep from their fingertips.

And the flowers. Las Calles de Flores.

I will forever know this city, Ciudad de Mexico, the city of flowers. 

Vibrant colors peak out of urban brush, exposing themselves to the corner eye-ed passersby. The corner of your eye may catch a sliver of beauty, but only when the sun chooses to cast a ray upon the lost and forgotten petals.

Every few steps, - between each hand-laid stone, fallen leaves and a few pieces of cluttered trash - a strayed bright-purple petal rests.

A reminder that beauty, like the best kept secret of life, resides in the details.

The essence of this city seems to be an energy in and of itself. It engulfs your mind and body, saturates you in its being, and leaves your soul to bask in that same very presence.

The smell of fried tortillas waft over the warm afternoon grey concrete, mixing immediately with cool distant mountain air and swirls away as a white and pink taxi might pass and lift and toss it all upward.

And as dusk turns to dark, the barking of faraway dogs engulf the night, accompanied by the echoes of a distant conversation in a foreign tongue. But foreign only to me.

This is my Ciudad de Mexico.

- Fuente de la Cibles. CDMX, Mexico. (December, 2017.)

I was dying when I arrived in Spain.

Eight weeks earlier, I had unknowingly contracted a severe liver infection in South America. And when the wheels of my plane touched down in Barcelona, the collapse of my liver function was at its peak.

With dark yellow eyes and sickness that caused me to faint several times in the street, I traversed the dark and narrow corridors that snaked together the Gothic Quarter.

I didn’t eat for days. My vision was hazy and in a fever of surrealism, I photographed the streets. Catalonian architecture is pulled straight from a Dr. Seuss story. And to see it in a feverish trip was a hell that I can’t entirely allow myself to remember without getting nauseous.

But the city, in all my infectious and ill vision, still held a beauty. It felt organic. It felt unique.

Upon uploading and editing these images, I had to pull the color from them. Looking at them made me feel ill. And the end result, this off-colored accented neutral, perfectly embodies how I felt while walking these streets.

Half alive. Dying. Fixating on and trying to grip that last bit of color. My life had faded to gray. And I was just trying to capture the last few scenes of my life; before my own shutter closed and everything as I knew it faded to a permanent black.

A trek through the heart of a Berber village, in Imlil valley, through the High Atlas mountain region of North Africa.

“There's a Christmas tree somewhere in London with a bunch of presents underneath it that'll never be opened. And I thought, if I survive all of this, I'd go to that house, apologize to the mother there, and accept whatever punishment she chose for me. Prison... death... didn't matter. Because at least in prison and at least in death, you know, I wouldn't be in fuckin' Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me. And I realized, fuck man, maybe that's what hell is: the entire rest of eternity spent in fuckin' Bruges. And I really really hoped I wouldn't die. I really really hoped I wouldn't die.” ― Ray, the hitman. In Bruges

The Cabo Rojo lighthouse rests at the foot of limestone cliffs overlooking the edge of the earth.

An aqua-colored pool of sea kisses the face of warm island under the heat of the Caribbean sun. Spectators gaze upon the tropical romance. Iguanas, butterflies and gulls. All witness the everyday burst of life at the edge of the world.

Just behind the lighthouse rests a vast salt flat. Half blue with water and half pink; an oversaturation of salt. The latter, colored as if an Easter pink candle the size of the island itself had been left to melt in the scorching Puerto Rican sun, and pooled between the sea and the rolling southwestern hills.

Calm and quiet. Tired, warm and worn; I had finally found paradise.

- Faro de Los Morrillos, Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. (October, 2018)

Touring through the West Bank was a unique, peculiar sort of travel.

It is a war zone.

It has been a war zone for many years, but on most days, it is a war zone without bullets, without bombs.

The peculiarity, is the tension that hides underneath. And the possibility that the calm could shift into a violent burst at any given moment.

But it does not.

Workers carve out statuettes from blocks of olive wood. Children ride down the hilly streets, past ruinous buildings and trash filled curbs, hanging onto the back of banged-up shopping carts and using the sole of their worn-out shoes and breaks.

When you enter Palestinian territory, you cross the famous “Green Line,” or the demarcation line set out in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between the armies of Israel and those of its neighbors. Essentially, the borders of Israel.

A giant sign is posted just before you cross, warning you of the dangers.

But after visiting Palestine, and crossing the Green Line, my view has changed.

Green, after all is the color of life, as it is for the green of blossoming leaves and buds after a long stretch of bleak winter.

And I could assure you, both are very much alive on either side.

- Jericho, Palestinian Territory. (December 2018)

A city gallery, blended of the ancient and the modern.

Salsa music pours through the streets as locals stop on the corner to buy a piragua from a cart. The air smells of mofongo and fried plantains.

Just a year before, Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico.

And a year later, some gas stations were closed. Most streetlights were out. And strewn down the highways crossing the island, you could see homes with ragged blue tarps replacing the space where a wall once stood.

Much has been rebuilt and the heart of Puerto Rico continues to beat. Loud, fast and accompanied by dancing women and a few drops of rum.

“Se levanta.”

Jim Morrison once wrote, “No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.”

The cemetery lies on the outskirts of Paris. On a brisk autumn morning, I slowly strolled between the headstones. I tried to breathe as deeply as I could.

Gray skies blanketed overhead, as a cold light mist coated my hair and camera lens. Every few steps, I’d notice a flower. Bright. Vibrant. Wilted. But, proud.

It seemed as if each flower was putting on a performance. A still and silent scene. Each petal had mastered its pose, while each stem propped it as if it was a stage hand.

Quiet. Calm. Serenity.

The still peace that certainly drifts up from the ground beneath you. It passes through your body and with gravity, grounds you immensely. In this profound zen, you bond with the dead that lay beneath you.

Dark brown soil plants heaps of soaked concrete. Evergreen pine encircles the earth toned maze. And in the grey of November, the bits of color from deliberately placed bouquets.

I don’t think I’ve appreciated a trivial stroll more. There was nothing, at that moment, more important in the world.

“For more than half the year Lima has a peculiar climate. It is never cold enough to have a fire, but usually cold enough to make you wish for one. It never rains, but is never dry; that is to say, it is not wet enough to make one hold up an umbrella, yet wet enough to soak one’s clothes.” ― James Bryce, South America: Observations and Impressions, 1912

“The man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world.” ― Oscar Wilde

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” ― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964

I will no longer question for as long I have left in life, whether or not I have witnessed beauty.

- Gothic Quarter, Barcelona, Spain. (October, 2018.)

“Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all virtues.”

The scene over the East River on July 4th, 2018. As seen from the streets of Brooklyn.

"What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago."

“There in the highlands, clear weather held for much of the time. The air lacked its usual haze, and the view stretched on and on across rows of blue mountains, each paler than the last until the final ranks were indistinguishable from the sky. It was as if all the world might be composed of nothing but valley and ridge.” ― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, 1997

December 11th, 2017.

The New York Times wrote: “A would-be suicide attacker detonated a pipe bomb strapped to his body in the heart of Manhattan’s busiest subway corridor on Monday, sending thousands of terrified commuters fleeing the smoke-choked passageways, and bringing the heart of Midtown to a standstill as hundreds of police officers converged on Times Square and the surrounding streets.

There is truly nowhere in the world like Africa. Thunderous drums. Over saturation of sunset. Deep red dirt. And the smell of smoke and earth, blanketing an entire continent.

I left much of my heart there, so my body constantly yearns and waits for its return.

An ode to Havana: A reflection of a Cuba worlds apart by a privileged outsider...

The contrast between life as we know it and an entirely different world lies in only a 90 mile stretch of clear blue waters.

Havana, you are a beautiful and surreal swirl of cultural vibrance, optimism and content being that is absolutely sun-soaked in poverty, desperation and hunger.

I've seen you as an entire city that smiles sincerely with a hungry mouth, focused on kindness and passion, but distracted by survival.

You hold dear to you the ideals of your revolutionary fathers in such a profound way, as if to say we got here not by means of just conflict, but by the divine hands of our ordinary countrymen.

You are torn between your defiance of capitalism, pride of revolution and the very real fact that communism has failed you. Yet optimism is all that shows in your demeanor.

You're decaying, colorful, beautifully architected buildings that literally crumble into your narrow broken streets is a symbol of the contradiction and uncertainty in which Havana's being itself resides.

You are astonishing and have changed my life.

Speaking with you and living amongst you, sharing scares meals and riding through your twisting streets for even only a few moments has carved out a tiny corner in my heart.

A corner that leaves me hungry to survive, hungry to learn, desperate to act on curiosity and most importantly to live deliberately, in between the pillars of hardship, where passionate ideals and uncertainty resides.

In that part of me, I will forever hold a piece of Havana. And until we meet again, farewell.

- Jose Marti Airport, Havana, Cuba. (July 2016)