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My name is Paco Feria, I’m a professional photographer based next to the Spanish city of Barcelona. I earn my living working for several townships and local magazines around home, but that daily work has nothing to do with my portfolio shown here. These pictures come from personal projects around the world.

What I mean by the term “personal projects”, is that I must pay for everything- plane tickets, dirty cheap hotels, taxis, motorbike rentals, and beers.  I am even in charge of the flea food which accompanies me along all my trips.

I hate flight. I hate planes. I hate that I’ve left home, and I really don’t like travel. The best place in the world for me is home. I like watch TV at night, next to my wife, and going out for dinner with friends, chatting, reading good books and making barbecues. As you see nothing special.  I am a simple man, a classic middle-class Westerner.

It’s a growing nightmare when the time to travel for my next project is approaching. I suffer depression, bad behavior, ire, disconsolation and doubts… many doubts. But, I know that all together this is just fear, a deep and irrepressible fear of the unknown.

At the airport, I almost must get drunk. My preference is towards Jack Daniel’s bourbon in order to be able to do something so aberrant for me such as boarding a plane that once I reach be semi-unconscious state of mind, then I can do it, with a little help of my wife, that is. If I’m lucky, I can sleep through the whole trip.

When I arrive to my destination, usually some place in the Third World, people look at me with a wide smile, thinking that the few dollars I have in my pocket might solve the problems in their lives, when really, I’m trying to solve my own.

I carry heavy photo-equipment, taking pictures of places and people that nobody asked or assigned to me and, that likely will not be sold,  at least in the near future. When I’m photographing the people, they sometimes smile for me, sometimes they do not, and, sometimes they ask just for money. I try to disappear into the environment and not capture the attention of the people, but always someone appears crying out from the dark, “Hello my friend!, “How are you!”, and the inevitable, “Where are you from!”

I know everything is over once I see the face of my woman waiting for me at the airport. While going back home in the car, I close my eyes , she drives, and, in the meantime, I recover the smells, landscapes and costumes of my loved country Spain. It’s then I know I’m back home again, and that makes me happy.

I know that  right now, you are wondering,  “Then man, what’s the reason for your travels?” I can assure you my dear friend, that I don’t know. I ask myself that same question over and over. What I do know for sure  is that, not doing this would be even worse than to do it.

It’s not my purpose to denounce or point at any culprits anywhere. People’s lives around the world are something much more rich and complex than some Messianic person armed with a camera is able to figure out. For me, the first beneficiary of any good picture is the one who took it, not the people photographed on it. Some of the people in this portfolio became close friends of mine. I remember some of their names, families and sons, some of the very good moments they have lived. Some have passed away in front of my eyes, and I prayed together with the family for his or her eternal soul.

Every time that someone told me that my work can sensitize, I feel confused, because that was not my intent. I respect too much all those known, and unknown people, in order not to play that game. As I wrote above, I’m a simple and confused man taking simple pictures of a world greater than me.

Contact: pferia@travelreportages.com

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