Vanitas Mexicanas is an ongoing photo series (and evolving publication) of bouquets being handed out in Mexican markets.

This project emerged as a personal reflection on cultural identity and belonging, seen through the lens of the 17th-century painting style, vanitas. Who is gardening and handing us our traditions and values?

I visited various markets in Tenochtitlan to capture the precise moments before a bouquet was handed from seller to buyer. The nostalgic movement of flowers from one hand to another made me think about the paradox of culture’s fragility and endurance—eroded by time yet passed with care across generations from one hand to the next.

Vanitas Mexicanas reminds me that although the petals of a flower in a painting—or, in this case, a photograph— may have long since fallen, their essence endures. Our legal status might shift, and geography might change, but the core of who we are remains, rooted in a deeper history.

Vanitas Mexicanas is not merely a reinterpretation of the traditional vanitas genre; it evolves to embrace the paradox of culture’s fragility and endurance— bound by borders, restricted by the law, and separated by the distance, yet passed across generations from one hand to the next.