Espejos del Alma: How Others Shape Our Becoming

The November light streams through my window at a different angle each morning, today painting golden rectangles across my kitchen floor just past 9AM. I'm nursing my café con leche, my ankle now almost fully healed, contemplating the thread that's been weaving itself through my recent reflections.

Yesterday, after posting about identity and belonging, I received an email from Amina, the Syrian chef I photographed. She'd seen the images I sent her and wrote something that's been echoing in my mind: "You didn't just see me, Sofia. You saw the person I am becoming."

No fotografiaste quien soy, sino quien estoy llegando a ser.

This morning, I'm struck by how profoundly our evolution is shaped by relationships—by the eyes that witness our becoming. We often think of growth as something internal, a solitary journey of self-improvement. But perhaps the most transformative growth happens in the spaces between us, in the reflections we see in others' eyes.

My photography has always been about connection, yet I'm only now understanding its deeper dimension. Each portrait is not just documentation but co-creation—a moment where subject and photographer evolve together through mutual witnessing.

I see this in my friendship with Martina, whose courage in rebuilding her life in Barcelona inspires my own resilience. In conversations with my mother across oceans, whose questions help me articulate truths I hadn't recognized. Even in brief encounters with strangers who allow me to photograph them—each interaction a mirror reflecting parts of myself I couldn't otherwise see.

Mastery, perhaps, lies not just in technical skill or artistic vision, but in this capacity for mutual evolution—the ability to be both mirror and witnessed, to allow relationships to reshape our understanding of ourselves and our work.

As I prepare for today's assignment photographing intergenerational music projects in Raval, I carry this awareness: that my evolution as an artist and human is inseparable from the web of relationships that hold and challenge me. That we become ourselves not in isolation but in connection.

Somos espejos del alma para los demás, reflejando no solo lo que son, sino las infinitas posibilidades de lo que podrían llegar a ser.

We are mirrors of the soul for each other, reflecting not just what is, but the infinite possibilities of what might become.

Sofia