MEDITATIONS is a 220 page monograph that presents 100 colour and black & white photographs taken by Mexican artist Diego Martinez Chacon during the five year span of 2019-2024 in Barcelona, London, New York City, Brussels and Morocco.

Every image was shot on film, and hand printed in the darkroom for the purpose of this edition.

“The first photograph I ever took with artistic intent was in January, 2019, in Barcelona, with an old film camera that belonged to my grandmother, passed down to my mother. Later that year I had a deeply moving epiphany of heart, as many people that age do, and had seen with some sense of clarity that I wanted to dedicate my life to filmmaking. At 22 years old, I then decided that the best course of action was to learn to make photographs, so as to train myself in the act of contemplating life through images, for an eventual venture into the art of filmmaking. Five years later I find myself looking at an archive of several thousands of photographs. My camera has taken me to many wonderful places, and allowed me to stand in front of hundreds of people around the world, and in an instant, capture their image, to be forever left in that surreal realm between time and space occupied by a photograph.

Through this I have found the gift of exploring my great sense of intimacy with the world around me, and most of all been able to understand, or at least try and make sense of, the many great complexities of my heart. At the center of every image stands a young man who was, whether to his knowledge or not, undertaking a nameless search for beauty, and asking himself: am I able to create something beautiful? And if beauty is within me, am I able to express what it might look like? I stood behind every single photograph, and as the world around me continued to change, and took me through the thousand voyages of youth, and I found myself changing with the seasons, so my way of seeing changed with me. Behind these images live those many tender sentiments of joy, pain, yearning, confusion, simplicity, intimacy, wonder, adventure, and love that every young person holds so closely in their heart.

This book is an effort to give those sentiments life, and leave them with a home - so it is my pleasure to present here 100 photographs taken from 2019 to 2024. All of the images in this book were shot on film, and printed by hand in the darkroom in a fully analogue process, which allowed us to consider and manipulate our choices in colour to the most careful extent. Through this photographic process we are able to present images that are, in the most basic sense of their nature, reflections of light, that were then carefully re-reflected onto paper by hand, and taken through a moving, live chemical reaction that then revealed the original reflection of light. There could be no more natural a process - here there are no lies between the image you are seeing and the colours and tones of light that the natural world allows.

Part of the beautiful nature of shooting on film is that it allows us to embrace and encourage imperfections in the reflections of light we choose to capture - a philosophy we made a point of carrying through to the darkroom process. Here mistakes become floods of colour, and blanket tones of light, and in many cases give the photograph new life and further their great abstraction. Every tiny speck of dust, and every subtle scratch, was present with us as we moved the film and paper by hand in the photographic process.

The 100 photographs featured in this book were chosen on the basis of pure emotion. Looking back through the years, it is clear to me the way some photographs speak towards certain feelings I held at the time of their taking, and how they form subtle lines between each other. I see those moments between freedom and confusion, where I could only speak through movement and colour. I see the Brutalism of London, and how greatly it became present in my sense of shape and form. I see Barcelona, and how it flooded my soul with colour. I see those many times I found myself hurt, where pain rejects colour, and a chiaroscuro of the soul is born. I see those quiet endless landscapes of wonder, where I yearned so greatly. I see myself learning, and at the same time disregarding, and all the time exploring. I see my youth, and I see a young man who had so softly learned his heart longed to live through the subtle and surreal.

Let this book be a document for all of those feelings, which I hold so dearly. A capsule of visions and emotions held amongst the wondrous passings of time. I am a person who believes in love, and whose nature is to follow the many endless mysteries of the heart. These sentiments are given to me by the people that I meet, and the places I go. Through these things the universe reveals itself to me, and I in turn reveal myself. This book is an effort in conducting all of those things into one, and in that effort revealing the moments in time that acted as paintings - meditations - of my soul.”

- Diego Martinez Chacon May, 2024