Pura Gente: Espanol

Hardcover book, Color photographs: 300 English. Printed in FSC. This book, more than an exhaustive effort to take portraits, is an open window on slightly more than 50 faces. A lens that gives us a brief but up-close look at the lives and memories of dozens of Ticos and Ticas. It’s only a fragment of the impressive mosaic that makes up the Costa Rican nation as we celebrate our country’s bicentennial. It is part testimonial document, part kaleidoscope, part mirror. A fragmented and arbitrary mirror, to be sure. But after all, what are mirrors if not objects that return an imperfect, ever-changing image? The book-mirror, by offering two distinct images together (one visual and one textual), seeks to create a three-dimensional image of the people portrayed that’s warmer, closer, and, we hope, profoundly human. Because the words and images complement each other, they overlap. They speak to each other and to us at the same time, helping us to understand things that otherwise we couldn’t: where that expression came from; how many roads that smile walked before being captured in a photo; what memories dwell in those bright eyes when they’re beneath closed eyelids at night.