In 1996, I attended a circus performance for the first time. Looking back at the snapshots I had taken, I realized there was something about them that continued to fascinated me.

After photographing several shows from within the audience, I eventually gained access backstage. At first, the circus people seemed both uneasy and uncertain about my presence and wondered why I was photographing things that, to them, did not appear worth capturing. Before long, however, they grew so accustomed to me that they stopped paying attention to what I was doing. I was able to move freely through the space and photograph almost unnoticed among them; I had become part of the daily rhythm. For almost a year and a half, I photographed performances as well as the life unfolding behind the scenes.

Both then and now, my intention was never to document the show itself, although these photographs inevitably remain a record of it. What interested me was capturing the way animals, laborers, and performers – nomads moving within parallel states of captivity, both literal and metaphorical – became part of a vast, surreal mise-en-scène, all participating in a spectacle from another era, destined to vanish; and deciphering the inexplicable feeling I sensed in their gaze at those brief moments when time seemed to stand still and they suddenly drifted inward, suspended beyond space and time.