NORTH
North is a group portrait of the Latin American émigré community in Toronto. The subjects are people I have met throughout the years I have lived in the city. All are immigrants from Latin America, and each has played a significant role in my own story of migration.
Through each portrait, I reflect on the processes of adaptation, integration, and resistance that I recognize in my own experience. By photographing each person individually, I inevitably project something of myself onto them. I do so by bringing my own questions and concerns about being a Latin American immigrant into each encounter. I search for the different ways in which we relate—or do not relate—to our shared culture. I seek to trace the boundaries of our cultural identities and to map the contours of our mental territories.
North is an ongoing project that includes both studio and outdoor portraits. The outdoor portraits are made along the shores of Lake Ontario, the city's southern edge. This setting evokes not only what is missing, but also what the collective chooses to “see” in the landscape.