In the Foreword to a new book of Mario Aglaze's photographs from Latin America, A Respect for Light, critic and author Vince Aletti writes, “Algaze has a marvelous sense of place. He’s not just passing through a city, he’s inhabiting, tasting, and smelling it. He records a streetscape or a café interior with a breadth, specificity and grace that’s more literary than reportorial. There are stories unfolding here: history in the stucco, intrigue in the shadows, love in the air.”

Born in Cuba, in 1947, Algaze emigrated to Miami with his parents in 1960. Speaking of his early years there, he said that he wanted to fit in to his new home, but he felt like an outsider. “The smell of America was different than that of Cuba. I remember asking my mother why the ocean smells different here. Years later I understood that in Cuba the seaweed, when caught on the coral reef, would dry and develop a unique scent.” His sensuous approach to life is innate, and plays out in the photograph in this book. 

Left: Suenos eroticos, 1997. Ecuador. Right: Xalalpa, 1981. Mexico. © and courtesy Mario Algaze.

After 15 years working as a photojournalist, shooting the rock scene for various magazines, he began traveling and photographing in Latin America. “I went back to my roots, to my identity,” he says of the trips he began making in 1974. He said in a recent interview, that he speaks—and photographs—in Spanish, and since then, “My only interest has been Latin America,”

The book, from Glitterati, presents a large selection of the photographs he made between 1974 and 2008, including images from Cuba, since his first trip back to his homeland in 1999. Mostly shooting in the early morning hours, before the sun has had a chance to “oversaturate” everything, he distills the essence of a place, in black-and-white images that capture simple details that confer the uniqueness of a space and its architecture. People not often the main subject, but often appear as a means to view the style of living that exists beyond the margins of the photo.   

Left: Club La Paz, 1989. Bolivia. Right: Memorias del Cuzco, 1985. Peru. © and courtesy Mario Algaze.

When people do take center stage, the result can be riveting, as here described by Aletti, in the Foreword. Regarding a photograph, on page 71 from Ecuador (top row), he wrote, “On one side of the store’s entrance sits a dark-skinned, brutally handsome man whose glance at the camera is sidelong, wary and casually menacing. He’s framed—penned in, really—behind the bare mattress of a bed for sale and beneath a bad painting of a nude woman, which hangs just above his head like a lewd idea. On the other side of the doorway, the arch-shaped mirror atop a bureau captures another woman—an oblivious passerby, gesturing emphatically. Completing the picture’s intricate narrative geometry, another mirror deep within the store reflects Algaze himself, snapping away. The vectors of desire ricocheting within this image, all tangled up in the sly complicity between the observer and the observed, are dizzing to track. Ripe and vaguely ominous, ‘Suenos Eroticos’ is the opening scene of a short story that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has yet to write.”

There is an opening reception on Thursday, April 9, from 6 to 8 pm for the exhibition, Mario Algaze | A Respect for Light. Throckmorton Fine Art, 145 East 57^th Street, NY, NY. The photographer will be in attendance and will sign copies of the book. Mario Algaze gallery.