Raining ash

The Calbuco volcano woke up, spewing a huge column of ash and smoke about 15 kilometres into the air.

In the capital, Santiago, I was sitting with my son Anibal at the dentist’s surgery for his appointment and checking on flights to the area, but they had already been cancelled.

The camera is a tool that gives me peace of mind. I keep focused on the story; I search for the right pictures with great energy and purpose. It’s crucial to me to show and maintain my respect at all times to the people I photograph, always to respect their dignity.

Images are abundant, it’s choosing the right ones that counts. The real challenge lies in selecting the correct images allowing you to tell the story.

It’s a complex process: I select situations I want to photograph, then I go through the images I’ve taken with my camera and discard the ones I don’t like or perhaps don’t work. The final step is editing the images on my laptop and getting them ready to transmit.

I photograph what I like and what I encounter on the way, I try not to set out with any preconceived ideas. Everybody has an interesting story to tell, there are hundreds of them.

In every catastrophe you find moving stories: the girl who walked for three hours because a landslide had made the roads impassable and she needed to look after her house; the man who stayed alone at his home when ash was raining down; the beekeepers who found their hives buried in meters of ash but their bees still alive.

People want to tell their stories and once in a while, it’s time to stop and just listen. As I listened to them, they showed me photographs of the volcano’s eruption they had taken with their mobile phones and their narrations helped me to imagine vivid pictures.

I prefer to carry very little equipment, just the bare minimum. One camera with a 50mm and a 24-70 mm lens. If I carry too much equipment that can be intimidating and therefore more difficult for people to open up, also to welcome you into their homes. On a practical level, it’s also much easier to move around without having lots of gear hanging around your shoulders and neck.

When I worked on this assignment I had to hitchhike to Ensenada town and then walk for a few miles. The access road to Ensenada had been closed to traffic but the police did let pedestrians pass.

While I was shooting images of the half-deserted town, my feet were sinking in the ash. I was totally concentrated on the job in hand, constantly thinking of what the next image might be…