The book
La Raíz del Aire brings together 164 photographs made in Costa Rica and short texts that seek to look at nature from another place.
How it began
Before travelling to Costa Rica, I began to ask myself what I wanted to photograph. I did not want to arrive in the rainforest and simply record whatever appeared before me. I needed an idea to guide the work before making the first photograph.
While researching the country, its motto appeared: Pura Vida. The phrase immediately led me to my mother, Eliana, and from that connection came the decision to dedicate the photographic work to her. Later I included Emma, my wife’s mother. La Raíz del Aire is dedicated to them both.
At that point I was not yet thinking of a book. It was a photographic project about Costa Rica. As the work progressed—the journey, the selection of images and the writing of texts—it gradually found its form and became this book.
Design and art direction by Esmuchatrama · @esmuchatrama, que dio forma visual y editorial al conjunto.
“The rainforest was not finished when life appeared. Life is the way the rainforest continues to build itself.”
Photography and writing
A journey to the essential
The photographs form the body of the book. The texts open pauses between them and shift the reading towards what does not always appear at first glance: relationships, transformations and the ways in which life sustains the rainforest as it builds it.
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