Siddhi

"Siddhi" is a project that combines intimate portraits of strangers with landscapes from lonely American cities. This series aims to explore the complexities of our decaying American society by seeing how beauty is so closely intertwined with despair.

Siddhi is a Sanskrit word which is pronounced like “city” but translates to mean “occult power/energy. This title came from a conversation that I had with a man named Truman who has been living on the street with his dog for the past two years. I was telling him about my photographs and mentioned: “I feel that there’s a dark energy in this city.” Without missing a beat he quickly replied, “I know, that’s why I came here. I’m hoping it’ll kill me because I’m too much of a pussy to do it myself.”

I was born in Peru in 1996 and immigrated to the US illegally with my family in my early childhood.

After barely graduating high school I spent my final teenage years running away from the world that I grew up in. I traveled in cheap cars, trains, and greyhound busses and began to engage with people that lived on the edges of society. They filled me with optimism as they allowed me a glimpse into an alternate way to live.

When I started to become intellectually engaged in my late teens, one of my early inspirations was the book “A People's History of the United States” by Howard Zinn. It was recommended to me by a man in a library who had a large anarchy tattoo that covered the top of his left hand. He lived in a bus in the California desert. He, and this book, taught me that in order to understand our society, and our place in the world, we have to engage with the people who are actually affected by the issues of our time, and not just take the news and history books as gospel. One of my photographic heroes, Chris Killip, said “These people will not appear in history books because ordinary people don’t. History is done to them."