My favorite photograph

To be honest, I don't have a single favorite photograph, because it depends a lot on what that image means to me. It can be about a fanaticism of mine, a special moment with my loved ones or a moment that marks an important event in my life. On this occasion I will speak about the last category.

Unknowingly, on Friday March 13, I took one last "outside" photo before being locked up for a few long months because a pandemic that until then seemed just an internet meme.

I remember very well how in just a couple of days the virus spread almost everywhere in the world, and just 3 days after I took that photo in my village street, the quarantine in Chile began.

It's a picture of an illustration in the streets of my city, innocent and childish. A street that until then was alive. It's always crossed by families, dogs and groups of children playing, rather than by cars. How have the children who participated in the pandemic dealt with it? Perhaps they never imagined that they would live something like this, with their drawing they were "celebrating public life" through the caricature of a smiling boy. You felt good going by there, that's why I decided to take the photo. But if you look at it in context and what came next, it's a pretty depressing picture.

But that's why that photo is so important to me, not only because it was the last day I was outside my home before the pandemic began, but the meaning and the irony it reflects. As if my subconscious had intuited it when I took it.