I met Olmedo Renteria the same way hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers have over the years: spell-bound while he performed his magic act on the subway. The encounter made the deepest impression on me. I remembered the magician so vividly, that twenty years later, the summer before Olin and Luca were born, I set out to find him once again.

Life is nothing if not unpredictable. When I was finally able to get Olmedini on the phone, I learnt that during the intervening years, he had suffered a stroke that had left him blind. I was astonished to hear that the then seventy nine year old magician was still working the subway despite his age and physical impairment. A few days later, camera-in-hand, I met Olmedini on a subway platform and we boarded the train together.

A few months went by. Five thousand photographs in, I wrote the New York Times to pitch the story. It was published as a double page in the Sunday edition of the paper. From there, it made its way across the world and seemingly overnight, Olmedini became an international star. His long-cherished dream of making it big in New York was finally coming true when the pandemic ground everything to a halt. Our photographic collaboration - if not our abiding friendship and connection - went on an extended hiatus.

This past summer, on my way back from Cuba, I stopped in NYC for a few days. I gave myself the impossible task of composing some sort of epilogue to the series. And I believe I did.

“Olmedini El Mago" has a truly complex underlying structure. It will be quite a challenge to sift through the images in order to sequence and organize them for publication as a book. But this coming week I am embarking on that process. I’m headed for my happy place, the sea shore. An artist residence of one. No community of fellow artists, no technical support, no production facilities. But I will have the luxury of time and solitude.

And that’s all I really need to get things started.