I believe that light is alive. Not a tool, but a presence I collaborate with: it has moods, generosity, reticence. It enters a room the way a person does, and for an instant it agrees to settle on a face and make it visible. My work is not to master it, but to listen to it, and to be found in the exact spot where it chooses to reveal something.
I believe that a portrait is not a copy. When I photograph a person I do not duplicate a face, I offer an instant of their soul a place in which to go on existing. The image becomes a dwelling: in there, something that would have vanished stays, and still breathes, even when that moment ended years ago.
I believe that one can only photograph what one loves. This is not a private feeling, but a gaze that welcomes instead of judging. When I look at a person through the lens, for a moment I love them the way one loves what is fragile and unrepeatable, and they feel it, and let themselves be seen. Without that love, only a beautiful empty image would remain. It is love that brings the soul to the surface of a face.
I believe there is something sacred in what is real. Not in idealised faces, but in true ones, with their creases, the things a person believes they must hide and which are instead the most alive part of them. Beauty lives precisely in the imperfect, because only what is imperfect is alive. My task is not to correct reality... it is to bow before it.
I believe, finally, that photographing is a small act of love against time. Everything flows, everything dissolves, faces change, instants do not return. An image holds a breath and tears it away from dissolution: it is telling someone that they existed, that they were seen, that they deserved to remain.
I do not take photographs to show what the world looks like. I take them to remind myself, and whoever looks, that behind every face there is a soul... and that loving it, even for the instant of a single shot, is the truest thing I know how to do.
