This image merges the furious energy of Bolivian folk dancing with its elegant grace and ethnic traditions. I selected my camera’s shutter priority mode, and chose to make this image at one eighth of a second. While the shutter was open, the dancers are depicted in various degrees of blur. The dancers who are moving very fast are suggested here only as ghostly abstractions. The dancers moving more slowly at this instant are still blurred, but are defined enough to convey their gender, costume, and dancing form. Deliberately blurring a moving subject is an interpretive choice. In this case, what normally would have been just a picture of dancers instead becomes an image of whirling beauty that happens to have dancers in it.

I photographed these Bolivian folk dancers on stage for more than two hours. I blurred them, I froze them, and in this case, I capture an instant of suspended energy that expresses the nature of the dance itself. Four dancers threw themselves into the air in front of me, extending their arms and legs as if they are riding horses at a full gallop. The costumes, as well as the streamers that flow from their hands, contribute to this energy. I interpret the nature of this dance by taking advantage of the shadows to abstract much of the hip and leg action. This abstraction contrasts to the defined costumes and facial expressions of the dancers. Even the frame plays a role in the abstraction. The upraised arm of the man in the green shirt breaks through the top of the frame, and suggests that he is reaching for the edge of the picture itself to pull himself and the others skyward.

The Altiplano, (Spanish for “high plain”), is the most extensive area of high plateau on earth, outside of Tibet. It is a desolate, wind-swept, rock-strewn landscape, set amidst barren mountains. I made this image at an altitude of almost 13,000 feet. I anchor this landscape photograph by filling nearly the entire bottom half of the frame with rocks. They point to a distant valley, which rises towards a range of snow-spattered mountain peaks. I wanted to interpret this scene as a cold, high, threatening place (its altitude alone is enough to produce illness). Yet the green valley and the blue sky that peeked through the cloud cover were quite pleasing to the eye, diminishing the forbidding interpretation I wanted to create. When I converted this image to black and white, everything changed. The peaceful colors were replaced with grays, whites and blacks that emphasized the jagged field of rocks in the foreground and the mountains in the background. The monochrome valley becomes merely a transitional zone, not a destination in itself. The clouds in the sky suggest the threat of a storm. By including a slice of the highway in the lower right hand corner of the image, I contrast the work of nature to the presence of man, even here on this Altiplano, one of the most remote places on earth.

In this part of Bolivia, children get to school in crowded trucks. The vivid colors of the clothing and the truck itself contrast to the pale colors of the bleak landscape that characterizes the Bolivian Altiplano. The presence of a new sidewalk in what appears to be an undeveloped area is also incongruous. This truck had stopped for a rest break, which tells us that the distances these children must travel are significant. It leaves a trail of exhaust behind it as it rumbles away. At least a dozen children are left behind – another truck will pick them up and take them to another destination. The interpretive strength of this image rests in its depiction of the unfamiliar world that is the Bolivian Altiplano. These children go back and forth to school in trucks traveling long distances at a 13,000 feet altitude. They are used to it. For them, such journeys are a fact of life. That is how my image interprets it as well.

Uyuni is a desolate gateway for tourists visiting the world’s largest salt flats. It has only 10,000 hardy inhabitants, yet hosts 60,000 visitors a year from around the world, mostly transient backpackers. This woman was waiting for a bus and trying to entertain her restless child. At one point, she took the child into her arms and began to twirl her around. I noticed that the flying legs of the child echoed the rhythms of the flying pigtail of the cartoon figure in the poster across the street. By exposing for the signage across the street, I turn the mother and her child into abstract silhouetted figures. My image, which attempts to turn life into art (as well as art into life), offers an interpretation of motherhood in this isolated Bolivian city.

La Paz, a city of two million people who live at an altitude of 12,000 feet, is the highest capital city in the world. The ever present thin air encouraged me to produce this hallucinatory scene. A man in a blue jacket was making a call before a wall covered by a psychedelic mural. He pays no heed to the blue bear that seems to sniff his backpack. Nor is he at all concerned about the giant red-eyed woman who seems to be hanging on his every word. We are left to interpret the meaning of this scene as we wish. Meanwhile, the man on the phone sees or hears none of it. He is too busy listening to the voice in his ear.