Como Juegan los Niños
As both a pediatrician and photographer, I occupy a unique position at the intersection of child health and human observation. Como Juegan los Niños (How Children Play) emerges from this duality, exploring the profound contradiction between safety and vitality that defines modern childhood.
Play is the laboratory of human development—where children learn to problem-solve, create, and navigate the complex social world they're inheriting. In my medical practice, I am tasked with keeping children healthy, safe, protected. Yet through my lens, traveling to communities across the globe, I witness something that challenges my professional instincts: children who play with fearless abandon, who transform scarcity into imagination, who find joy in the margins of safety we've so carefully constructed.
This series is rooted in family memory. My father's stories of his resource-strapped childhood in Indonesia painted pictures of play that was inventive, unbound, alive with possibility born from limitation. Those tales planted a seed of curiosity that has grown into a fundamental question: In our well-intentioned efforts to protect children, what essential elements of childhood are we inadvertently constraining?
