Today I have three beautiful kids, Carolina-born through and through, and by my side is the love of my life, my wife Edimar.
I've shot weddings for Latino and American couples, quinceañeras, restaurants, and food trucks. I've helped entrepreneurs get their businesses off the ground, and I once ran my own food truck. But to understand why I do any of this, you have to go back much further.
As a kid, I used to visit the United States. I knew the major cities, had passed through dozens of airports, had eaten my way across this country. And there's one memory that's stayed with me like it happened yesterday.
I was 22 years old. I was just passing through on my way to New York, and on that layover I met Charlotte for the first time. From there I went up into the mountains to snowboard — it was December. When I got to New York, it was beautiful: a fast, wild city with an enormous food scene. I did something there I love, street photography, and visited the Statue of Liberty. But my mind stayed in Charlotte.
I never once planned on emigrating. But if I ever did, I always said the same thing: it would be to the United States, and I'd love to live in Charlotte.
Why? Charlotte and the Carolinas carry a piece of my country in them. Mountains, rivers, lakes, beaches, snow, four clearly marked seasons. The infrastructure looks nothing alike, but in everyday life I found, in two states that share the same name, almost everything my homeland had.
I've been living here eight years now. I've watched my kids grow, and my business grow with them. I've built friendships, and lost some too. I have the privilege of living under the same sky as my parents, and under that same sky, I'm here today with my wife and my kids.
In honor of this land that gave me everything, I made a decision: to do something I never could have done in my own country. Travel it. Study its culture, its history, its food. Help the people who still aren't sure if living here is the right move. Help others find, not the best restaurant, but the right one for the experience they actually want.
To be good citizens of the land we live on, we have to know it, honor it, and respect it. There's so much richness here, so much history, so much food, spectacular landscapes and sunsets worth photographing and telling. I want to help people live the Carolinas the way they deserve to be lived.
That's why I decided to take what I do in a new direction, without ever stopping being what made people know me in the first place: a photographer. A career born right here, out of necessity, out of looking for time to do something I love. Among everything I've studied since, I decided to add something I'm genuinely passionate about within visual storytelling: documentary filmmaking. As a tool for telling this land's story, it feels powerful, and lasting. If you've seen me doing something different these past few months, this is it.
I want to build my personal brand as a cultural and food documentarian of these states, to help people already living here, or thinking about it, get to know this land. Never setting aside my services along the way: I'll keep helping every business, brand, or person who wants a professional image for what they're building.
This is the most important part for me: leaving a legacy. That the generations coming after us respect, preserve, and share Southern culture, and carry it forward as a way of living.
And of course, freezing moments in time will never stop mattering to me: a wedding, a quinceañera, a business just getting started. I just also want the images of your business, your brand, your restaurant, to carry a seal of real quality, and to show how beautiful things look when we respect what we photograph.
This is the first post in this space. The next ones will be about food, about weddings, and about this land that's my home now.
— Carlos Soto PH