“How can one live a life full of nothing?” This question from The Secret in Their Eyes, the Oscar winning film from 2009, strikes me every time I watch it. Filmmakers say a movie isn’t truly seen until it’s watched at least twice. The same happens with books, cities, and people. A first encounter barely scratches the surface; only with time does the gaze refine itself and discover what was once hidden. Not just because new nuances emerge, but because we ourselves change.
Perhaps that is the essence of life: the insatiable curiosity, the desire to unravel the hidden, to rediscover what we thought we already knew. And yet, we cling to the familiar, walking the same paths as if we fear getting lost in the unknown. For the past few weeks, the secret of my eyes has directed my gaze elsewhere. The corner of my eye moves away from these lines, distancing itself from the paper and the edition you hold in your hands. Sometimes, we must step back to see something in all its splendor and reveal a new facet at every sight.
In the photographs by Maureen M. Evans, of Chef Mónica Patiño at Casa Virginia, the banal becomes exceptional, and the exceptional becomes tangible. In Japan, Yosigo captures fragments of life—ephemeral moments in the night, drifting to the rhythm of cigarette smoke as it sketches his unique artistic vision across the Tokyo sky.
The gaze has the power to reinvent the world. Some see beauty in the unnoticed, some capture the fleeting and turn it into a story. The image doesn’t hide; it reveals; it doesn’t describe; it transforms. Many photographers teach us this lesson every day: creators who, through the lens, take us by the hand and lead us into a universe where color and perspective create landscapes that verge on dreams, where the real dresses itself in fable, and architecture becomes the stage for a new story. Through their viewfinders, the routine takes on texture, and the moment becomes eternal.
Under a blinding sun, Romain Laprade transports us to one Arizona that seems frozen in another time, a fantasy embodied in the sumptuous forms of Taliesin West House, brought to life through his bold use of color and perspective. Whereas in Todos Santos, Luis Garvan unveils VIPP’s new house like a dreamscape, where memories blur and images are wrapped in mystery.
There are gazes that invite us to pause in the ordinary, that don’t just capture the world, but reinvent it. They invite us to look twice, to discover what has always been there, waiting to be seen.
