Alexander Acosta Osorio, the only Colombian AUBG student, recently presented an exhibition at the ground floor foyer at the Main Building. The visual message of the photographs taken in Bulgaria and New York City is enhanced by two quotes that accomany the collection: one from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and one from E. B. White's Here is New York.

Q: What is the story behind the exhibition?

A: The photographs from New York were taken over six years with a manual camera using black and white film (35mm), and then developed in the dark room. Some of the photographs are deeply personal, others [are] part of my first workshop in film photography, from which a final portfolio was produced and which remains at LaGuardia College, where I studied Fine Arts ... The photographs capture the energy, dynamics, and feel of living in the capital of the world through my eyes. During this time, I was introduced to diverse writers, including E. B. White, who wrote an epic essay titled Here is New York. It depicts what it was like to live there in the end of the 40s. ... Despite that the City has changed and the New York of the past is only a romantic vision, the soul of the city, those men and women from all walks of life are still very much alive and making of the city that hectic, crazy, and amazing place on earth were everything is possible. The photographs are not the final product, but those remaining images and prints from the creative process. In other words, what people are able to see is all the work that I went through, my very experience.

The photographs from Bulgaria, on the other hand, represent a glimpse to my first year here. They are in color and are taken with a digital camera. They represent the beauty of the every day: nature, custom, people, food, views. The difference with New York was startling. When I arrived to Bulgaria, I felt like a little boy once again. Everything and everyone amazed me. I found this place humble, still devoid of much of the ills of modernity, a treasure, indeed. ... For this part of the exhibition, I chose a paragraph from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which, as a Colombian myself, is the earliest reference I ever had to this part of the world.

The exhibition is not only about experience and soul, [but] also about photography itself. The medium has a profound impact in the intensity of the message. I want to show how different my experiences seems when recollected in film and then in digital format, and ... how that visual message is influenced by the text that goes along with it. The right combination of text and images is important to deliver a message successfully. I want to share a bigger message, put my experience in the bigger picture, one that relates to all of us.

Q: How long have you been working on the photographs?

I had the photographs from New York for a while, six years, and the ones from Bulgaria [are] the product of my last year. So I’ve been working on those images for a while. .... I’ve got hundreds of photographs from New York - it used to be thousands, but when I got married and moved out to Jersey City for a while, I sadly lost a lot of them. Now I am trying to figure out how to storage all my images, as the digital files take a lot of space in the computer. On the other hand, storing my prints from New York has been a bit easier as I still have some room available under my bed.

Q: Was it hard to make an exhibition?

A: No. I have had a few exhibitions in New York City already; some at LaGuardia, my previous college, and others in the New York art scene. So it wasn't hard at all. For me, as always, it is fun to sit down and think about what I want to share and how. It is a creative process in itself.

Photos by Alexander Acosta Osorio.