The unrelenting drizzle and piercing gusts of wind are amplified once I reached the top of Corcovado, soaring above Rio. After shimmying through the lines with my expert guide Neyla, crowding into the sky tram that climbs through the lush hills, separated merely by a glass window but still a world away from the curious stray dogs and child squatters still asleep on their dirty mattresses that hug the tram tracks, Christ the Redeemer greeted me.

I was raised Catholic but left it when I was 20. Today, I weave around atheism, agnosticism, and a subdued sense of spirituality, so I found it difficult to appreciate the emanating emotionality coming from fellow visitors on that early morning as they looked upon the the statue, tears in their eyes.

But regardless of one’s beliefs, it seems impossible that Christ the Redeemer would not affect you somehow. It stands before you, grand and welcoming, but you can’t help but look beyond the grandiose and examine its cracks and and stains. When looking back on why I took the photo, the imperfections are what pulled me in. I try to avoid filters and fancy effects with my pictures, so minus some auto-corrections, what you see here is what I saw, or at least, what I remember: the grays and blacks and pales, trying desperately to find hued blue contrasts but failing on that cloudy, frigid, windy morning.

Traveling and recording our experiences, desperately seeking to capture our memories of how we feel and what we think for that ephemeral moment, has a way of consistently surprising us, doesn’t it?