Jun 24

Jun 24 Photo Journal Monday: Guarionex Rodriguez Jr.

Untitled (Chinola) © Guarionex Rodriguez Jr.

I started this project in 2010 as a personal series of portraits of my father. I was interested in knowing him better and understanding how he felt about his decision to emigrate from his home of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to a completely different climate and culture in Lynn, Massachusetts. I took lots of intimate photos of him but later became principally interested in digging deeper into his life that he led before my family and I came along.

As the project has progressed over the past nine years, the subjects of my portraiture in Santo Domingo have grown from my father and immediate family to distant relatives and eventually to those previously completely unknown to me in the community. As I've focused on taking photographs of the latter, the decision to consistently have a slow process of working with a large format camera has become a conscious commitment to taking time and care to build trust with my subjects and, extended, to forge my own intimacies in a city to which I have always felt at once linked and distant.

These photographs from Santo Domingo show family, friends and community at work, play and leisure, and they experiment with many styles that range from the candid to the theatrical to the statuesque. The comfort of the subject is paramount in each, and the overall goal with the series has been to collapse distance and time spent apart.