When thinking about both sides of the camera, I decided to go physically to the other side of my camera. However, after several times of being my own subject photographically, this particular time was extraordinary. Perhaps the fact that these photographs are not about a point from the past that I wanted to convey they are photographs in the present, this moment, in real time. It became my task to describe an affirmation of life, of a new reality via the photograph.

As there is a huge tradition of self-portraiture, some of my inspirations have been Annette Messager, an artist who uses everything including photography, and more recently a photographer, Elinor Carucci. From Carucci, I took the authentic self and from Messager, the constructed version of the self.

When thinking about both sides of the ocean (south) - United States - Caribbean - Dominican Republic, I placed my self on the other side. The American, the gringa as other, in a Dominican world, that I now call home. However, I am la gringa with a camera. I made hundreds of photographs from that perspective as outsider looking in. After I made the image "Es el Tiempo, Verde" (It is Time, Green) of a woman, a man, great body movement and literally the hand of time dropping its glittery moments of sand off to the left side of the photograph, I knew this image spoke about a specific time, a specific reality.

In the current images, I am either integrated in the situation or isolated. However, I am not always comfortable in my position. I purposefully placed my self here and there within the photograph. I used a polarizing filter to allow less light into the camera and used a slower shutter speed to reveal movement whenever it passed, reveal time. In the image "Pajaros del Sol" (Birds of the Sun), I am the older woman yet the naive one on so many levels as my arms flutter and fling about.

When thinking about both sides of my family, I have always been on one side or the other. I have my Puerto Rican side and I have my Maine side. Finally, both sides are converging; they are doing this on the other side of the ocean via the other side of my camera.