La Ciudad Desnuda

Long exposure photographs made on film in the unguarded hours of the night, across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The series strips the city down to light, color, and trace, turning its stillness into a space of intimacy, vulnerability, and refuge.

La Ciudad Desnuda is an ongoing series of long exposure photographs made on analog film in the cities I have lived in and moved through, beginning in Hong Kong and continuing through Japan, Thailand, Madrid, and now Miami. The title means the naked city. It describes both what the camera finds in the empty hours of the night and what the work asks of the viewer, a willingness to shed the layers of expectation and see a place in its raw, unguarded state.

The work begins on foot. I walk for hours through the night carrying a tripod, a camera, and a cable release, until a corner or an alley produces the feeling I am looking for, some pocket of the city not fully understood, asking to be looked at longer. Then the ritual begins. It is somewhere in the small hours of the night. The unguarded stillness of the city belies the movement it has seen. There is a quiet anticipation in the air. I set my exposure, a moment of intimacy, a slowing down, a symbiosis with the city. A susurrus of light, color, and shadow takes form as my subconscious is made real in the exchange in front of me. Through the waiting, each second stretched through the open shutter, I watch every line and hue of the shapes before me recede and be reborn anew, and I think about the many steps that have passed through this exact corner before mine.

There is a politics to this ritual. The night city is a space women are taught to move through quickly, alert, never lingering. To stand alone on an empty street for the full length of an exposure, sometimes many minutes without moving, is to refuse that instruction. The camera gives me a reason to stay, and staying is the point. Each photograph is a record of time I occupied on my own terms, in hours and places I was told were not mine to inhabit. The refuge in these images is not found so much as claimed.

To be naked is to embrace that vulnerability as a source of strength. The exposures, held open from seconds to several minutes, dissolve the literal record of the street. Architecture softens into something spectral, passing figures become traces, and color turns into a language of its own, speaking of joy, existence, and the freedom to be present in the space one occupies. What remains in the frame is not the document of a place but the sensation of having stayed in it. In cities built for circulation and speed, standing still becomes a small act of resistance, and the resulting image a refuge.

The work began as nighttime wanderings through Hong Kong and the landscapes of Thailand, and developed into a formal research practice during my Master's in Documentary and Fine Art Photography in Madrid, where the walking, waiting, and exposing were joined by material experimentation with cyanotype and thermal receipt printing. The series is shot on medium format and 35mm film. It continues wherever I find myself when the city empties.