xavier bermeo photography

I was probably ten years old when I first learned how to play with light. When I was a kid I spend part of the summer with my grandparents, in Cuenca, Ecuador, seven hours from Quito where my family lived.  Cuenca is in the southern part of Ecuador.) My memories are of a huge old house that smelled of wood, old books and food – it was all foreign and familiar at the same time. There was an indoor, central patio with a green tile floor that seemed impossibly big to five year old me.  It was a great place to build forts and play soccer. My cousins, brothers and I would play for hours in and around their huge house.  It was a great place to build forts and play soccer.  Sometimes we would even ride our bikes in this patio. There was also a smaller room upstairs from the patio that everyone called the “camara”.This room didn’t have any windows and was used mostly to store things. But it also contained a very strange machine that looked a little bit like a small cannon, pointing down to the floor, the machine was made of metal and covered in dust.   It seemed like nobody had used it in a long time. It was an enlarger, used to make photographic prints. My Grandfather had loved photography all his life and this small windowless room was his dark room.

One night my uncle Ricardo taught me how to develop film and how to enlarge prints using that same old enlarger. We played with some old family negatives and photos that my grandfather had taken decades before. I did a print of my mother when she was five, and learned some film developing “tricks”: how to add more shadows, how to “burn” parts of the print. It was magic. And I was hooked. We must have spent hours in that place but it seemed to me that no time at all had passed.

Eventually I studied photography at the French Alliance in Quito, did a small exhibit with them and over time, switched from film to digital.  My  initial love for the dark room, the film, the magic of transferring light to paper and capturing time and space transformed into love for what photography really is: the unique opportunity to play with light;  to freeze time and space – to discover the beauty of everything that light touches.