"I landed in America in 1965 from Chile. I literally arrived on a banana boat. I went to the University of Notre Dame in the midwest and then to Columbia in New York. I had a teacher also a photographer who taught foreign students to write and speak better English. I would try to write poetry, which he thought was terrible."
"Columbia was very prosperous. The students were well off and many were the sons of extremely rich people. I felt out of place. Also, there's just a huge sense of loss when you leave your country and you don't know anybody and are on your own. It made me want to look at what else was going on: to see the other side and the underside of the city."
A Chilean immigrant arrived in America in 1965 on a banana boat, studied at Notre Dame and Columbia, and began photography after encouragement from a teacher-photographer. The photographer carried a Pentax Spotmatic through New York and observed sharp racial and economic divides, noting that half the city was white while the other half was Black and Latino. The contrast between Columbia's wealth and the surrounding poverty resonated with prior family losses. Deindustrialization, job losses, and visible addiction created dangerous streets, which heightened observational intensity and drew attention to the city's underside and everyday desperation.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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