Ryan Christopher Jones is an independent photojournalist based in New York. He contributed the following essay to In Sight:
“No Estuve Aquí” is not a deep dive that attempts to represent an entire culture; the scenes are quiet observations about a country I have a theoretical relationship with. They’re asking questions about a place I’m just starting to appreciate, and they try to draw a line between the imagined and the real. Childhood, transience and tradition were the lenses through which I saw Mexico, and the country begged me to be more than a tourist or travel photographer. Mexico is still a vague, untapped curiosity to me, though it has stirred up complex questions that touch on the bigger themes of “what is home?” and “what is foreign?” I felt compelled to be a historian of sorts. I’m the first person in my immediate family to go back to Juchipila since my grandmother immigrated, and I felt an obligation to see the country, report back to my family and say, “This is what we’ve been missing for 70 years.”
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