For fifty years, the camera has been my steady companion. Since 1975, it has traveled with me through cities and small neighborhoods, down side streets and along thoroughfares, into quiet corners and crowded squares. Together we have wandered, most often without an agenda, without a destination, and without a goal in mind. The journey itself has always been the work. What I have sought, again and again, is simply the moment — the unrepeatable instant when something ordinary becomes worth remembering.

It always begins with light. Light moves me. It is the first thing I notice and the last thing I let go of. I look for what strikes me as beautiful in a given moment — beauty that arises when light, gesture, and composition arrive together in the same breath. Sometimes that beauty appears in a face, sometimes in a doorway, a shadow on a wall, a stranger’s posture, or the way a street holds the afternoon. My subjects are the people and places I encounter, and my role is to be present enough to recognize them when they offer themselves to the frame.

If the camera is where my work begins, the darkroom and the print shop are where it comes into being. These are sacred spaces for me. They are quiet, patient places where the image moves from latent possibility into something held in the hand. It is there that I decide what a photograph wants to become — which surface, which process, which method of printing will honor what I saw. Often I combine several techniques within a single print, layering them until the image feels whole. The process demands attention, slowness, and a willingness to remain in the present moment, accepting whatever unpredictability arises. The surprises are part of the work; they are often the best part. The hours I spend in the darkroom and at the press are the hours in which I feel the deepest connection to what I do.

My practice draws from a personal archive of negatives and positive films gathered across decades of travel and observations. From this collection I select images that ask to be revisited, and I bring them into dialogue with a range of alternative printmaking processes: cyanotype, gum bichromate, paper lithography, pronto plate lithography, screen printing, and solar plate printmaking. Each process carries its own history, its own temperament, and its own way of translating a photograph into something tactile and singular. A cyanotype speaks differently than a gum bichromate; a solar plate print holds the image in a way no silver gelatin print ever could. Choosing among them — and sometimes weaving them together — is how I pay tribute to the subjects, the places, and the moments that have stayed with me.

This body of work is, in the end, a record of journeys: the literal ones I have taken with my camera, and the slower journeys I take in the studio, where each image is given a second life by hand. It is a tribute to light, to the people and places that have offered themselves to me along the way, and to the analog and alternative processes that continue to remind me why I began in the first place.

— James Cuebas