Emboscados invites readers to a deeper practice of perception. It offers two routes to widen awareness, encouraging a pause to measure the strange and a compelling act of telling what is seen. When a writer named Juan Ramón Santos finds a distinctive voice and when a photographer who also writes, Nicanor Gil, discovers a singular gaze, they enter a shared space of creative happiness where the story seems to write itself, as if every moment is aligned for the camera to capture and the shutter to release. When their paths intersect, a book like this comes to life.
No gaze is neutral. Writing chooses a stance and makes a choice. This book guides readers toward the Mirador de la memoria, a tribute to those forgotten by the Civil War and Francoist repression. The sculptures by Francisco Cedenilla feature four naked figures looking toward infinity, and that gaze is the common thread these two authors invite us to share. Thus four ways of seeing emerge: the photographer’s, the writer’s, the sculptor’s, and the faces of the people depicted who look beyond history and return to tell its story anew.
The photographer’s view is paradoxical, making things more visible even in fog, dim light, at twilight or dawn. I see you; in our memory you remain, as one statue bears that inscription. The poet’s gaze is likewise paradoxical. He chose to tell the history through haiku, which, in the spirit of Basho, captures what is happening in this place at this moment. The haiku invites a fragmented look, sometimes anxious, sometimes tranquil, telling the story of those who fled into the mountains through the four seasons. It is a tale of men who escaped to the hills, of the maquis, and of the tragedy hidden in the valleys of Jerte and La Serena, places photographed and narrated beneath the steady eyes of those who do not seek because they already know what to see.
The haiku, like photography, captures a moment and then expands it, much like the wings of a butterfly about to take flight. Along that ascent, the two travelers accompany us above the statues, the water, and the landscapes, with eyes sometimes veiled by fog or scarce light, yet compelling us to open ours until it hurts. That awakening, that pain, that power to approach what might have been and perhaps was not, to what happened, and to what the four statues that gaze at us symbolize so we never stop looking—that is the function of powerful literature.
In this work, memory is not a dry archive but a living field where image and word fuse. The photograph does more than show a scene; it asks questions about memory, responsibility, and witness. The haiku, with its crisp syllabic discipline, invites readers to inhabit the moment—the crack of chance in which a life is traced and a story found in the spaces between breaths. The result is a conversation among the art forms, a quartet of perspectives that speaks to the viewer with honesty and humility. The book does not pretend to erase the scars of the past, yet it offers a way to look again—to acknowledge pain without surrendering to despair, to remember without becoming trapped by it.
The connection between the photographer and the writer is not mere collaboration; it is a shared insistence on looking without flinching. The sculptor’s four figures anchor the narrative, giving tangible shape to memory and offering a visual chorus to accompany the textual and photographic voices. Readers are invited to walk among these voices—between the seen and the said, between the remembered and the told—and to decide what to carry forward. The work does not instruct; it questions. It does not close doors; it opens rooms where reflection can happen. In doing so, Emboscados becomes more than a book: it becomes a personal invitation to readers to see, to question, and to remember, so that looking becomes a continuous act of witnessing and understanding.