Carlos Paz-Bordone
Carlos Paz-bordone (b. 1961) is an autodidact photographer based in
Lima - Peru. He currently works as an audiovisual producer of documentaries and programs on public TV in Lima.
Carlos Paz-bordone studied Media Communication at the University of Lima. After his graduations, he worked as a photographer for a magazine in Lima for two years. Later on, he moved to England, where he lived for
At the age of seven, I fell in love with photography when I was given my first Kodak Instamatic camera, with which I took pictures of my family and friends. Some years later, in the early 1970s, my father gave me permission to use his Zeiss Ikon camera that he bought in England when he was a scholarship student of mechanical engineering. This was a rangefinder camera without any mechanism to focus, so I had to calculate the distance two years and was a member of the public British Film Institute, where he attended exhibitions and talked about photography and moving images.
As he returned to Lima, he worked in television production programs and documentaries for development agencies, including NGOS and others. Among his extensive experience, He has also worked for the BBC TV and Natgeo channel in documentaries in Peru. by eye to focus the photos. The camera also did not have a built-in light meter, so I used the shutter speed and the aperture recommendations printed in the Kodak film box.
These techniques did not always give good results, but using them taught me to think about the distance and the exposure before taking the photos. They also taught me how to cope with frustration when looking at the printed photos; the results were often not good, much less those imagined.
These bad photos also taught me the importance of composition, so I became interested in photography magazines, discovered great photos, and taught different techniques to take better photos.
Those were the times of analog photography, and to be able to take and develop the photos, you had to save the tips, and above all, you had to wait several days to have them printed. Also, this hobby was very expensive for a teenager, and thus I had to be very careful when taking photos so as not to waste film and run out of it. Therefore, this way of taking photography also taught me to wait and to be prudent.
When I turned 18, my dad gave me my first reflex camera, a Pentax MX. A mechanical camera, which forced me to set the exposure values according to what the photometer indicated. With this camera, I switched to using the slide films used by the National Geographic photographers, whom I admired, the Ektachromes and the Kodakchromes, and I realized that these films behaved differently from the negative films it took me time to expose them properly.
Later, when I entered university, my parents gave me an enlarger, so I started developing black and white. And for the first time, I witnessed the "magical" beauty of looking at the positive image that appeared when the paper was in the developer.
A couple of years later, my Pentax was stolen, and I had to suddenly stop taking photos, which was too hard to bear. But since I was already in college, the basic cinematography classes first and the video and television classes later filled that void little by little.
In the final years of my career, I got a job as a photographer in a magazine, where I worked for two years; and then I entered an advertising video production house as an intern. Then, three years later, I got a job in a television channel as a cameraman and video editor for social
and cultural reports. This was the beginning of my career in television and producing documentaries for development institutions, NGOS, and others.
Throughout this journey, I applied everything those films and analog cameras with their technical limitations taught me about photographic technique. This knowledge significantly helped me to be professional in the field. As I already knew about photographic techniques more than my colleagues,
I was able to focus more on interpersonal relationships with the people who were the protagonists of the stories. This is another essential aspect of photography. Knowing how to gain the trust of those who agree to pose in front of your lens. Trust is based on respect for the other.
The importance of transmitting to that person the feeling that you really respect them as a human being is a crucial factor. That you respect his pain or joy, his failures or achievements, at the moment of taking the shots, and above all, after in the editing and publishing of the story.
Respect is an act of faith on their part, and one as a producer or photographer must honor that trustworthy deal with their figures and not betray it. Here the photographic experience becomes an act of ethics. All these human and dynamic aspects are involved in photography; that's why I love being a photographer.