I wrote this statement in 2010 for the exhibition Mexico City-Toronto shown in the Collaborative Urban Research Laboratory of York University in Toronto, Canada. These photographs were taken between 2003 and 2005, first in Mexico City and then in Toronto. Despite their thematic and aesthetic similarities, these two series actually have little in common. The first, the Mexico City photos, were an attempt to distance myself from the premises of digital photojournalism, which I had been working in until then; the second, the Toronto photos, were a way of remaining a photographer in a city that questioned everything I had been up until my arrival.

Both “projects” were a sincere attempt at making good photos but I never attributed more value to them than that of the pleasure or the pain they gave me when I looked at them in private.

Now, as I try to give them a coherent narrative for this show, I see that these images retain their life and that the principal attribute of photography—documenting the passage of time—is evident in them, too. Both cities have changed: where before there was a construction project, an empty plot, the advertisement for a new building, now the promised mound of concrete has been poured. And that is what photography is: history. In this case, a history of particular private and public places.