Hi my name is Jose Lopez Bernal and I am 18 years old. When I turned 18 everyone started talking about all my responsibilities as an adult saying that everything in my life was going to change, and that I had to pay attention to all of these new things. Being bombarded with all these new responsibilities was overwhelming but one of the few comforts I found was photography. Going out on the weekends with friends to take photos every weekend made for some of my favorite moments this year.

Since I got into it, photography has been a great tool for me to truly connect with the world outside of myself and appreciate its beauty. I first started taking photos in the height of the pandemic to distract myself from the isolation of my room. I started taking photos in a time where everybody was locked in their rooms but funnily enough my favorite thing to take photos of is people, and human connection.

Connection

Human life centers around our connections. Without connections, everything would cease to exist. Every moment of your life is a connection you are establishing. If you are talking to a friend or family member, you are installing a connection with them. If you are listening to music on the bus ride to school, you are connecting with the different rhythms and beats in the music. These connections dictate our emotions and mold the people we become. My photos always have a subject in the frame because I like to emphasize life in my images. I want to tell a story about the person in the picture. Through this, I can tell the story of how connections impacted the subject’s life.

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For this project I went with the theme of duets. As I was compiling photos for this presentation I realized that my favorite photos often overlapped and I decided that pairs was the best way to present these photos. After I put the photos into pairs I really liked how the photos came together to tell a story and give more context than one image could have given alone. I had never presented photos in this way and it was something new to me. It was a very interesting revelation and I will be sure to think about presenting photos in this format again.