At his 1990 Nobel award ceremony Octavio Paz read, “Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. A time past or future, real or imaginary was pure presence, and space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, a neighbor’s patio… The world was limitless yet always within reach, and time, pliable, weaved a seamless present.” At one point or another, usually early in our lives, we tend to experience time in this way. The past is kept in the same drawers as our dreams and memories - sometimes available but not always, and the future is no more than our desires and hope: the present waiting to be lived. But then there is a moment when that spell is broken. For me that moment in which I was placed outside of my present was clear. It happened in the eighth grade, in geography class. Growing up in the Dominican Republic, I remembered the sun not doing anything else but making things present; yesterday and tomorrow seemed the same and interchangeable, and the island was surrounded by an ocean of nothing and all. Then suddenly, the world became too small, too known. The ocean got covered with the traces of historic voyages, and the sky was a grid for the trail of airplanes coming, going, or passing by to another place. The world outside made the island feel like a box within which I had grown to the limits. The real present was a time outside of my yard, far from the mango tree and away from that hill I used to climb behind my grandmother’s home.

For more than 20 years Alex Morel has been photographing his extended family - those people and places closest to him searching for that illusive sense of awareness capable of arresting time. This attempt has resulted in a significant body of work that not only chronicles his and the stories of others, but one that at its heart is a contemplation of our relationships, our emotional and psychological connections to what surrounds us. Geographically, the work extends over an area that covers part of the Caribbean and North America: New York, Moca, Santiago, and Port Au Prince playing a central role among others. While deeply personal, the series addresses other broader issues such as migration, cultural connections and displacement, gender roles, and the evolution of identity. The last picture in this work has not yet been made.