A Photographer Who Writes About Philosophy
I weighed 24 ounces at birth. I was three months premature, with little webs between my fingers, not enough strength in my jaw to nurse, unable to open my eyes to the blinding light. Dr. Vicente Corral Moscoso told my father that I wouldn’t live, that I wouldn’t survive the trip to Guayaquil, where there was an incubator, and that without heat there was no way I could make it. My mother was too sick to react. But Isaura Narváez, a cheery, irreverent Indigenous woman who worked in my parents’ house, refused the death sentence. She cradled me in her arms for ninety days and ninety nights.
I remember Isaura clearly. Because of some old and festering disappointment in love she hated men, and she owned just two things on earth: a revolver and an accordion. She would say, “Men are bastards,” — the revolver was to defend herself from them, and the accordion because she believed no one could live without music and poetry. Isaura was probably not more than four feet seven inches tall, and her skin was dark from working in the sun.
Nothing made her angrier than abuse, injustice, mistreatment, and she felt it was her place to right all wrongs. I can still hear Isaura laugh — a light, mocking laughter.
I am convinced that we human beings are the sum of our encounters with others. The people we meet along the way define us, mark us, transform us. Some encounters are so defining that without them, nothing else makes sense. We are who we are because of our contact with others. Out of those encounters grow culture, language, our understanding of the world, the way we express love, the way we are hurt by death.
Wonder: The Living Seed of Philosophy
When I graduated with a law degree in 1990, I gave my diploma to my father and decided to follow the passion that had accompanied me since childhood: photography. I let myself be guided by curiosity — a militant and determined curiosity. I knew that journey would not only take me to unexpected places but would also bring me into contact with people who would change my course — who would help me become who I am.
Photojournalists are obsessive. We can spend hours waiting for the perfect light, for the moment when everything converges within the frame. We believe in chance. We’re convinced that if we wait long enough, and work tirelessly, the world will reveal itself, and that a captured instant will become a symbol, a representation of something far greater and more complex.
But the truth is that almost none of my colleagues are photographers because they love their own images. We are photographers because we are in love with the experience of the world. We are fascinated by the way people connect, love, stop loving, wait, dream, and work. We are in love with the creatures of the world, and with light.
Yes, we are like children who love our toys: cameras are our passports into unexpected places. I admire the precision of my old lenses, the effort behind their design and engineering. Sometimes I hold my tools in my hands and marvel at their mechanisms, at the delicate choreography of glass and metal.
If you photograph with honesty, you cannot help but be filled with wonder. The world is cruel and violent, yes, but for those willing to look slowly, attentively, with presence—not just seeking utility—the world unfolds, vibrant and precious.
This capacity for wonder is the source of photography, and the seed of philosophy. “It is through wonder,” wrote Aristotle in Metaphysics, “that men, now and in the beginning, began to philosophize.” Photography requires an attentive gaze upon the world — the Greek thaumazein — wonder as a conscious, loving, vibrant stance.
Most people take photographs to remember, to affirm affection, to testify to their ties, to offer visible proof that they existed and that they loved. Some of us photograph to denounce beauty, to ask others to look at this complex world with awe — a world both painful and marvelous. We photograph because we want to share, because we want to say to others, “Look, pay attention. My gaze, my point of view, might enrich your own.”
Returning to the Origins
Being a Nieman Fellow at Harvard allowed me to return to my intellectual roots, to integrate parts of myself that had long felt scattered: the law, photography, my love of philosophy and literature.
The arrival of digital intelligences has pushed me to write again. Why is this moment — the emergence of a new generation of AI — seen by many as one of the great turning points in history? Because never before have we had the opportunity to converse with a non-human entity using human language.
The philosophical consequences are seismic. Our very identity is being questioned.
If there is a machine that can speak and seemingly think, then perhaps it is not language that makes us unique. What, then, defines us? What makes us different from artificial intelligences? The most urgent philosophical question is: What makes us human?
If there is something a machine cannot know because its nature does not allow it, it is the experience of living. The machine has no body or senses, even if it has sensors; it is not subject to mortality, for death does not frame its perspective on existence. The machine does not know love, connection, doubt, fear, need… transcendence. The machine has no emotions — not yet.
What makes us unique — what distinguishes us from the machine — is the experience of life. Not just the narrative of life, but life itself.
And yet, that experience we share with all living things. Life, nature, homeostasis — the desire to live — is what separates life from non-life. Animals and plants, seen as primitive and inferior in our anthropocentric world, are in fact our kin. That explosion of life around us is our connection to the cosmos, the root of our vital consciousness, and the origin of empathy, imagination, and what we call humanity.