Photographer Fernando Alejandre is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of these images. To see Fernando’s body of work, click on any photograph.

The greatest joy in every frame I capture is to immortalize a fragment of a present conceived in the past.

I’m a firm believer that this present is built from that past we can no longer touch. That is how my short journey begins.

I am Fernando Alejandre, born in Altamira, Tamaulipas, Mexico, with Huastecan roots from northern Veracruz. This heritage turned out to be the main spark in my path as a photographer: from traveling by bus and being captivated by the everyday life of the highways, to the vibrant essence that lives in every town I have visited over the past four years.

I’ve dedicated myself to visiting these small places that hold a unique essence that can’t only be called Huastecan culture, but part of Mexico’s broader cultural identity—an essence of town and roots, of souls who live their past in the present, without excess, only enough to remind us who we are and where we are going.

I am Huasteco, and I’ve devoted projects to preserving this culture—from learning about it to exposing and experimenting with its rituals and traditions, such as Xantolo (the Huastecan Day of the Dead)—with the goal of creating a photographic archive that will endure through time, accompanied by small chronicles infused with both collective and personal memory.

Open to experimenting with various photographic techniques, I arrived at analog photography, which I had been imitating digitally for a while. Coming face to face with analog shifted my focus to a vision that sees the world as a fragment of the past—not as nostalgia, but as a frame carrying a photograph vibrant with emotion. An image that speaks not just of composition, but of the feelings of those captured in it.

My path is long—longer than I imagined. I have witnessed the beginning of the roots of my land, of my culture, and I continue on the road, aiming to capture everything that light cannot carry to the eyes of those hungry to see. To gift a piece of memory in the world to those strangers who live in each town, in every corner still preserving the essence of old Mexico—full of kindness and incomparable stories that only time can preserve… or a certain type of sentient soul behind a camera.

No photograph belongs to me. It belongs to everyone who appears in it.

Because art is not the property of the one who creates it, but of what is revealed.

And for me, it belongs to the pueblo.

To where I’m from, where they’re from, and where we’re all from.