/about
Alfredo E. Pérez is a photographer and writer, and an engineer by profession. Born in Caracas and based in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, he writes in Spanish and English. He has published books of photography, poetry, and short stories, and his poems have been set to music by Ricardo Lorenz and Manena Contreras. He leads a nonprofit dedicated to classical music education.
/rendezvous
I remember the smell of sawdust while my father and a man I had never seen before cut the boards for a small bookshelf.
When I try to return to that room, memory takes me somewhere else, to the beach house where I grew up. Another living room, another library, this one with two large bookcases whose upper shelves were beyond my reach. I spent long stretches of time there, looking at the spines, trying to decipher unfamiliar names and subjects.
One large illustrated encyclopedia held me longest. It described the first journey to the Moon. Aldrin, Collins, Armstrong. Diagrams, trajectories, photographs, captions. The illustrated rendezvous fascinated me. I could not understand how such an intricate maneuver was possible, but I kept returning to those pages.
What stayed with me was not one image alone, but the way the page assembled things. A photograph of three astronauts seen through a small window, apparently waving toward people outside the frame. A caption offering clues. Words extending what the image could not contain. Diagrams making an invisible operation legible. Color, typography, spacing, and the limits of the page organizing everything into something I could begin to understand. I still remember the paper in my hands.
I did not know then why that combination of images, words, diagrams, and structure held me so completely. I understood it much later, while trying to write these lines.
Engineering came afterward, carrying another vocabulary of organization. Karnaugh maps could reduce a complicated binary system to a few essential relationships. Typewriters, early computers, diagrams, cinema, poetry, photography, negatives. Different forms, but the same recurring pleasure of arranging limited elements until another possibility appears.
Photography introduced another kind of order. The negative, the frame, what remains inside and what is left outside. Many attempts failed. That was part of it too.
Science and engineering taught me to question, to observe closely, to notice the detail that disturbs an apparent order. Images still make me stop at what usually passes unnoticed.
What I try to make today grows somewhere between that early curiosity and the systems I learned later. Photographs, words, diagrams, fragments. Small attempts to give form to an observation.
Enough, perhaps, to begin a conversation with friends over coffee. That still seems reason enoug
/apy
Alfredo E. Pérez
Caracas · Lansdale
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