Mirror

🗺️ Place: London, England
📍 Location: Aparthotel Adagio London City East
📅 Date taken: 24 June 2025
📷 Camera: Fujifilm X-T30 II

From all the places I thought this would start, this was not the one I ever imagined. If anything, it was the one I was avoiding at all costs. Only if the right opportunity arises, I'll do it, I'll use this self-portrait, which, actually, I like a lot.

It is one of the first pictures I took with my new camera, and the way it came out was a complete accident. By that I mean the light, the shadow, the background. It's all luck.

I was just still finding my way around the camera, struggling to set the settings, trying with different subjects around, with no success.

In that moment of randomness, just before leaving my hotel room, I took this picture. I didn't check it, I shot it and left.

Pushing

I've been thinking A LOT about starting this project, this place where all my images can reside. An archive for posterity, as I like to think about it. A place where, years later, I can come and revisit all those places and moments through the pictures that I took along the way. Snapshots of a moment in time. A permanent place for the temporary.

During that thinking, one of the questions I asked myself the multiple times I intended to begin was, what picture should be the first one? It has to be something meaningful, I thought, something that I kept going in circles about, that I couldn't shape, and that ultimately kept pushing me away from what really matters, the real work.

I was avoiding. I was afraid.

And the thing is, that in the same way I pushed away the doing, I needed to be pushed back into, abruptly, forcefully, and very uncomfortably.

We all know that everything worth doing requires effort; that growth only comes from discomfort. We all have heard these lines in any shape or form, and as much they have become a clichè, we also know they are true, one way or another, yet despite knowing all this, they are still hard to enact.

We all need a push. Sometimes small, other times big.

I had to have a mirror put in front of me with nowhere else to look, so that I could not escape myself anymore.

Look at yourself in the mirror and figure out whatever that is that is getting in your way, because a lot of the time it will be you. Act on it, and if needed, get a push.