founder.

from 1998 to 2018, Castro worked in supply chain and software operations: Robbins Scientific, SmartTurn, RedPrairie and JDA, then DiCentral.

what those years taught him is that systems rarely fail at a single point. they fail when small constraints stack up, and a good record matters more than speed. so much of the work was making what the system said match what was actually on the shelf, and the gap between the two was where the trouble lived.

in june 2018, Castro went to puerto rico and began his documentary practice with families still recovering from hurricanes irma and maría. the work continued in guatemala after hurricanes eta and iota, and it showed him that the constraint logic he had seen in supply chains shapes recovery too: aid arrives late, paperwork adds delay, and recovery systems can deepen the conditions they're meant to fix. as he put it in 2024, "when the roads collapse, or the water system gets contaminated, there hasn't been a plan b."

in november and december 2022, a residency at Casa Lu in mexico city set up the turn in his practice. it started with a wall of twelve cyanotypes on raw-edged fabric, his guatemala photographs pinned to black, and from there Castro kept turning documentary images into material: cyanotypes, dye sublimation, whole installations, partly so the stories could reach people who would look away from a black and white photograph of a destroyed village. photography became a starting point instead of an end, a way to look at how systems make things impermanent. the process started small, with a test print on paper under uv light and his notes written on it by hand, before the larger print on fabric in direct sunlight. those notes, and the receipts for the fabric, are where the tools began.

closer to home, in 2021, he taught a summer school photography class at a high school in the bay area. after an assignment, a student from guatemala told him it was important to document his life, and the people around him, so his future generations would know him. he shared that he never met his grandparents, because back home they didn't have a camera to take photos.

a working photographer keeps three things going at once: the thinking, the equipment and the archive. most tools keep them apart, with the gear in a spreadsheet, the archive on a hard drive and the process in a notebook, and none of them speak to each other. that isn't a failing of the photographer. it's what happens when every tool was built for one part of the work.

Castro saw it as the kind of problem he had worked on in supply chain and software operations from 1998 to 2018, and built the tools for his own practice first: diary for the why behind the work, lab for the film and the darkroom, gear for the equipment, and edition for photo books, with where each one came from and what shape it's in. they answered his own questions first, which roll, which chemistry, which edition, which camera. the same questions come up in every working practice, so the tools opened to others, by invitation.