J.M. Magano: Mucho por Ver, Even Now

There’s something unresolved about the title Mucho por ver. It's not optimistic, not tragic either. Just open. Suspended somewhere between what’s left and what’s possible.

When J. M. Magano first presented the series in 2024 at the Museo Tiflológico de la ONCE, it was already clear this wasn’t photography in the conventional sense. It wasn’t about documenting the visible... it was about translating perception.

Now, with the launch of the book at La ONCE, that same body of work returns in a different form. More intimate. More complete.

Magano has said it himself: he doesn’t try to photograph images, but sensations, simply because for him, “almost everything has faded to black.” 

What that means in practice is a body of work that feels constructed rather than captured. Light is unstable. Forms dissolve. Shadows carry more weight than subjects.

There’s a constant sense that the image is on the verge of disappearing, and that’s precisely where it holds.

His process reinforces this. Working with 19th-century techniques like calotype, he builds each photograph manually, treating negatives more like surfaces than records, adjusting density, light, and contrast like a painter would. 

The book doesn’t just archive the work, it reframes it. If the exhibition was spatial, the book is temporal.

A sequence of images interrupted by short phrases. Not to be seen as captions, not quite explanations, rather something closer to fragments. Together, they create a rhythm that mirrors his way of seeing: partial, intuitive, built from memory as much as from light.

It reads less like a monograph and more like a passage.

You move through it the way Magano describes his own vision: through feeling, not clarity.

Magano’s vision loss was progressive. Not sudden, but gradual, forcing an adjustment not just of sight, but of perception itself. 

And that shift is central to the work.

Where conventional photography depends on precision, his work leans into ambiguity:

“You can lose your sight, but never your gaze.” 

At the book launch we had the pleasure of attending, what stayed wasn’t just the work: it was the way he spoke about it.

Loss, yes. But not framed as an endpoint. More as a condition you learn to move within.

There was something precise in how he described his process, but also something disarmingly open in how he spoke about hope. Not as optimism, but as continuity. As the decision to keep making images even when the act itself becomes uncertain.

A story of hope and beauty.