Photographer Flor Garduño perhaps isn’t as celebrated as many other fine art photographers in the world, making it even more of a treat. Peruse her images, and you’ll find how she used lighting to make flowers look like fire, fruits look like organs, and scenes that have set the bar for many photographers who came after her. Flor’s photographs are at the center of a new pop-up exhibit at SOL LDN, lasting only February 15 – 20th. And that means that you’ve got a very limited amount of time to see her work in person.
All images by Flor Garduño. Used with permission from SOL LDN. Please visit their website for more information. More of Flor’s work can be found on her website.
Sol’s images are a thing of beauty. Born in Mexico in 1957, she was first inspired to take up photography when she was very young. Through the encouragement of a teacher, Flor did more than just make photographs. She got into various types of printing, like palladium platinum and printing her photographic portfolios in silver on gelatin. Unfortunately, these are mostly forgotten processes these days — though if you ever get a chance to see this kind of work up close and personal, you’ll realize exactly what you’ve been missing by being bedazzled by Instagram all day.
Her career has been spent shooting beautiful images and getting to know the life of the indigenous people of Mexico. It involved portraiture, architecture, mystery, and the elements.
Work from Flor Garduño is bound to inspire so many different photographers. If you’re a travel photographer, you’ll understand what it’s like to gain the trust of the people that you’re photographing and to be slow about your work. Documentary photographers will also find beauty in how she frames her images. Those who like black and white are bound to be dumbfounded by the work she does, along with her specific use of lighting to tell the eye where to look in the frame. Flor’s work also involves much portraiture, especially with the female nude form.
Try to search for “fine art photographer Mexico” in Google, and you’ll be presented with not a whole lot of historically great images. Instead, you’ll yield searches on wedding photographers who shoot in a fine art style. But Flor’s work is starkly different. Her images don’t seem to have the idea of a commercial aspect to them being put at the fore. Instead, there are documentary and journalistic credentials that are present. It’s about telling a story that isn’t given a whole lot of spotlight.
However, this exhibit is a pop-up, and you can visit it in London for a limited amount of time. A lot of our readers are based in London and many of our readers tend to travel. So if you’re around, we recommend visiting this gallery and taking in the work.
More importantly, we as photographers also need to understand that this form is starting to go away and deteriorate. All the work that photographers in the past have done to help people realize that photography is art is going to disappear if we don’t make conscious efforts to try to make prints and experiment with alternative processes.