Born, Lea, Die — a river running through a valley, and through my family
In Basque, jaio means to be born and hil means to die. Between those two words flows the Lea: a small river in Bizkaia, seventeen kilometres from its source above Munitibar to Lekeitio, where it meets the Cantabrian Sea.
For centuries this river powered one of the densest concentrations of ironworks and watermills in the Basque Country. For generations it has also been the backbone of my family's life — several generations on both sides were born in villages along its course, and today I live in the restored ironworks beside the mill of Eresa. When my parents died recently, we laid their ashes at the river's source and beneath a tree by our home.
Jaio, Lea, Hil photographs this river as a way of photographing time itself — a family's time, measured in births and deaths, and a valley's time, measured in the slow ruin of a way of life. The ironworks and watermills that organised life here have almost entirely disappeared within two generations. The farmhouses empty. The young leave.
This work integrates photographs made along the Lea over the past fifteen years with new medium-format work, sequenced without chronology and rendered in a single tonal world — closer to a dream of the valley than a report on it.
Work in progress, 2011–2026.
