I am a people-collector. I create and collect their images for safekeeping and their stories for inspiration. I write about the things that push us apart as human beings and the things that pull us together. I grew up in the Dry Cimarron Valley of NE New Mexico on my Grandmother's ranch. I have a deep appreciation for people, animals and the environment. "In the image she could see how the landscape and her body were parts of one another, how the two were the same as in the moment they merged, fleetingly, in time. It was here mostly, on the caprock overlooking her childhood playground that she thought about the notion of heaven and a time when her dust and the red rock dirt would merge and transform, sealing the prints of scrambling cherry toads, cedar and chokecherry into another fossilized layer on the landscape." M. Alcartado