Año cero, year zero. Where Pipa and the camera first found each other, long before the video portraits and the VHS years. You can already see it here: the green eyes, the dare, the reason I kept coming back.

We were outside under an open sky, clouds drifting behind her, and the wind would not quit. Her hair, all that warm copper red, kept flying across the frame, and at some point I stopped fighting it and started using it. She’d reach up, grab a fistful, and let it go again, and the sun threw these little dappled shadows across her face every time.

She wasn’t smiling for the camera. She was squinting into the light, half serious, half deciding whether she trusted me yet. I think that’s what makes this first roll worth keeping. Nothing was settled. Everything was still a question, and she was looking right at me while she asked it.