founder.

from 2002 to 2018, castro led supply chain and software operations across medical device manufacturing (Brain-Info), enterprise resource planning systems (Red Prairie), and logistics optimization (DiCentral). this work involved hundreds of software deployments, integration decisions, and production system audits across regulated environments: medical manufacturing, military-grade logistics, complex distributed systems.

what this taught him: systems don’t fail from single points. they fail from cascading constraints. efficiency measures optimized for throughput create brittleness under disruption. documentation and process rigor matter more than speed. infrastructure is invisible until it breaks.

in 2018, castro traveled to puerto rico and began establishing his documentary practice documenting communities navigating disaster recovery, displacement, and systemic abandonment. this work, primarily in puerto rico (hurricanes irma and maría, 2018) and guatemala (hurricanes eta and iota, 2021–2022), made clear that the same constraint logic he’d observed in supply chains governed disaster recovery systems. aid arrives but arrives too late. bureaucracy accelerates delay. recovery systems produce more of the condition they’re meant to fix.

in 2022, during a residency in mexico city, castro began translating documentary images into material forms: cyanotypes, textile transfers, installations. this marked a shift from photography as endpoint to photography as raw material for exploring how systems produce impermanence. this post-documentary practice, moving from documentation into material translation, became the foundation for understanding how structural insight could become operational infrastructure.

working photographers and documentary artists operate across three simultaneous domains: creative thinking, equipment assets, and physical archives. most tools treat these as separate categories. spreadsheets handle gear. hard drives hold the archive. notebooks capture process. none of them talk.

castro recognized this as an operational problem, exactly the kind he’d solved in enterprise systems for 16 years. the tools were first built for his own practice. they solved three simultaneous walls every working photographer hits: the need for structured process memory, professional equipment tracking, and collection management for photo books and art that preserves provenance and condition.