Esta Es Mi Ciudad – Daniel Buckley photographs Tucson
Lola Alvarez Bravo, self portrait, Center For Creative Photography
Click to enlarge
In 2013, Tucson’s Center for Creative Photography featured a massive show of work by Mexican photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo.
Spanning three large rooms, the exhibit featured portraits of her artist friends, scenes from everyday life, political work, photos of a journalistic nature and a more abstract body of work. In her black and white work one saw a love and appreciation of geometry, an artistic eye for light and shade, an appreciation of form and texture and an eye for design. One also saw her appreciation of artists and everyday people, her love of her country and her keen eye for her place and time in the world.
Poet/performance artist/dj Logan Dirtverbs Phillips in Dios de la Adrenalina.
It took me several days to take it all in, furiously writing notes as I progressed from image to image. There was so much to see and so many stories told in these splendid images.
In a new photographic series of my own, titled “Esta Es Mi Ciudad” (This Is My City), I am trying to look at Tucson not in imitation of Lola Alvarez Bravo but rather using her body of work as a lens through which to seek out my own vision of my home of the last 42 years.
Girl With Scarves from “Este Es Mi Ciudad.”
I tend to think that if Lola had lived in the age of reliable color and digital ease, we likely would see the vivid color along with the gray scale drama of her world. As such, while I have done both gray scale and color versions of the photos in this series, it is the color images that I choose to present.
My ongoing series currently features portraits of artist friends, scenes of everyday and extraordinary life in Tucson, and the interplay of color, light, form and texture on both the actual and concrete landscapes of the city.
I am primarily shooting the city in daylight for this series, though there will later be more night images as well.
Maynard’s at Sunset
Tucson and Arizona have provided a lifetime of artistic inspiration to me. In the years ahead I hope to share a corner of my experience of this part of the world through this photographic series.
Here are some early works from this series.
Congress Street at night
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Old and new
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Artist Danny Martin
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– Daniel Buckley, December 2013