Mav Gutarra

I grew up around film. My father was a photographer, and I absorbed the medium long before I picked up a camera myself. I never studied photography formally; my style has grown into something cinematic, classical and meditative. My current work is black-and-white portraiture and still life, shot on film under studio lighting. Film is a physical trace of light, slow and irreversible, and that makes it the right medium for exploring life and death. Building each image with light and composition before the shutter opens makes me work more like a painter than a photographer. The other thread in my work is consciousness. Years of daily meditation have shaped how I see the world, with a sense of stillness and unity beneath the surface of things. In the Indian tradition, darshan means a sacred seeing, an encounter with something larger through sight itself. That is what I hope a photograph can offer: not something to look at, but a moment the viewer briefly steps inside.