A few times a year, photographer Omar Cruz swaps South Florida’s seascapes for Rococo facades, waiting out hours between sessions in a darkroom near Place de la Bastille. Where others might watch the clock, Cruz revels in the empty hours. He transforms the technical pauses into artistic meditations, traversing the centuries-old streets, his lens drawn to the fleeting tableaux of Parisian life.
It’s been about six years since Cruz, the Miami-based photographer behind any virtuosic Gulfshore Life cover over the past five years, stopped mostly working for others’ gratification. He maintains a curated roster of commercial clients to underwrite his creative freedom, but the artist—who is represented locally by Naples’ Method & Concept gallery—now devotes most of his time to personal work.
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Omar Cruz's Villa Paris (On Rue François Miron), gelatin silver print (2023)
Omar Cruz's Villa Paris (On Rue François Miron), gelatin silver print (2023)
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Omar Cruz's Stranger #34, gelatin silver print (2018)
Omar Cruz's Stranger #34, gelatin silver print (2018)
Cruz is the rare photographer who still develops his photographs—as moody and chic as the Parisian streets he walks—and travels to Europe for the right printer. Recently, he’s been working on Skin and Shapes, a series with models in compositions that crop limbs and drapery to reveal graceful, abstract patterns of light and darkness. The images look like film noir stills, elegant but not overly nostalgic, artful but not alienating.
For most of his commercial career, the Puerto Rican artist photographed Latin music royalty, setting himself apart by capturing them sans their traditional bravado. Behind Cruz’s lens, rapper Pitbull stares slightly off-camera in a contemplative state, and the charismatic Colombian rockstar Juanes broods in a white T-shirt.
After studying photography in Manhattan, Cruz returned to Puerto Rico, where his work with local magazines led to bigger opportunities. Within four years, his photograph of Ricky Martin graced a TIME 1999 cover, announcing “Latin Music Goes Pop,” and he became a regular photographer for leading Hispanic entertainment magazine People en Español. “I wasn’t just the kid anymore,” he says. Cruz settled in Miami, amassed a big team and adopted powerhouse music producer Emilio Estefan as a professional mentor.
Omar Cruz’s The Bloom, gelatin silver print (2024)
Omar Cruz’s The Bloom, gelatin silver print (2024)
Omar Cruz's Stranger #35, gelatin print (2018)
Omar Cruz's Stranger #35, gelatin print (2018)
Omar Cruz, Lyric, platinum print (2023)
Omar Cruz, Lyric, platinum print (2023)
After his mother’s passing in 2019, Cruz started craving a more personal connection to his art. He simplified, recreating the days when it was just him and his camera. Skin and Shapes started around this time. In the series, voluminous folds of fabric read like billowing robes, and faces are often obscured by ethereal fabrics or capes, recalling his fascination with the nuns’ wardrobe in his Catholic grade school. The figures are captured half-dressed or nude, with the framing strategically cropped so the expanses of skin create abstract compositions.
“It’s not about the person, it’s about the shapes,” he explains. Elbows form sharp angles, and bare shoulders become wide planes. Cruz isn’t one to over-plan his photoshoots; the location can be in an empty apartment or in front of a neighboring tree. His connection with the models, many of whom he works with repeatedly, drives the composition. He asks himself, ‘Is she part of the poem?’ discerning the story behind her gaze and whether a model will fit into a certain setting, a certain lighting scheme, a certain timing.
Trademark elements of his style are evident from his earlier artistic work, dating back to the aptly named Strangers series, which he began—unknowingly—in 1998. As Cruz traveled between New York, London and Paris, he found reprieve from the hectic celebrity assignments that fed him professionally by roving the city before him, snapping straightforward portraits of passersby, their forms often fragmenting under flickering lamps.
Omar Cruz’s Woman in the Garden, gelatin silver print (2024)
Omar Cruz’s Woman in the Garden, gelatin silver print (2024)
Woman in the Garden, photographed at Naples Botanical Garden, showcases the sophistication that only hands-on developing can deliver. “It has three layers: the leaves, which I left white—they look like birds or wings; the subject; and the background that’s dark but detailed. You see everything,” Cruz says.
Strangers came out of a desire for balance, Cruz says: “I was tired of giving my heart to everyone instead of using it for myself.” He wanted to capture the world as he saw it, with a sense of subtly delicacy and romanticism, life as poetry. “There’s an element I always look for, and it’s beauty,” he says. For Cruz, beauty manifests in emotion rather than aesthetics. “It doesn’t have to be the most [traditionally] beautiful person,” he says. “First, what I look for is that their face carries a feeling, an emotion.”
That his models are all women is more by occurrence than design—though he admits the female form carries an inherent grace that suits his work. “The subtlety of a woman’s arm doesn’t communicate the same as a man’s,” Cruz adds. His interest extends to dancers of any gender, drawn to their trained understanding of form. “People who dance have a fabulous education that complements my visual language,” he says.
Cruz’s personal work is all rendered in black and white, harkening to his early studies at 14, when he learned to shoot and develop in monochrome. During his commercial years, black-and-whites provided the mental switch he needed to go from the ultra-saturated call of his day job to his personal work.
Omar Cruz’s Untitled, gelatin silver print (2021)
Omar Cruz’s Untitled, gelatin silver print (2021)
Cruz travels to Paris’ storied Picto Bastille laboratory, where he works with masters of gelatin silver, his preferred medium, along with luxuriant platinum prints and etching-like photogravure. “They understand my eye, my approach to the medium, my sensibility of artistry,” he says.
In a way, his approach yields far more intimate portraits, the subject’s essence coming through in gestures and shadows. The printed form of the photos is equally symbolic and evocative, with the glossy ink mimicking skin’s natural oils. “The texture from the development and printing is grainy, imperfect,” he points out. A digital print would seem too flat, too cold to capture humanity. The developed image, on thick French paper embossed with his signature on the bottom right side, makes the photograph tactile and sensual. “Every grain tells a tale, and every contrast holds a secret,” he says.
At Paris’ venerable Picto Bastille laboratory, Cruz works with masters of gelatin silver printing, including Thomas Consani, whose father printed for photo legend Henri Cartier-Bresson. “The moment silver halides react and the scene unfolds under red light is pure magic,” Cruz says. Whether done in gelatin silver, ultra-luxe platinum, or etching-like photogravure, the process requires patience but produces the impossibly inky blacks and rich surfaces Cruz’s work demands.
In Armatura, a woman’s fingers wrap around her side and rest on her upper arm, a single finger extended. Her nail is painted white, reading like a burst of light against her ebony skin. Shot in 2021, the image, like much of his work from that time, is dramatically filled with stark expanses of black. The pieces follow the periods of intense grief between his mother’s death in 2019 and his father’s passing in 2021. “I was producing a lot of dark pictures, shooting on those extremely dark days,” he says. “I wanted everyone to feel what I was feeling.”
Omar Cruz’s Self-Portrait (2024)
Omar Cruz’s Self-Portrait (2024)
“I see in black and white,” the Puerto Rican photographer says. “I can identify the tonalities in a form in the moment.” In the darkroom, he works side-by-side with the printers, collaborating on which areas need to be deepened or softened or when a different paper is needed to achieve the desired texture.
As he learned to live with his grief, Cruz began reintroducing more light into his photographs. His oeuvre—whether brash Caribbean rappers, weathered New Yorkers or sylvan models—possesses the same quiet, silky, silvery quality, as if the sky is slightly overcast but crystalline; his practiced eye could catch dust motes in the Louvre as easily as the post-storm haze on the Gulf.
Behind the lens, Cruz finds his sanctuary—a rare escape from a chaotic world into an image frozen in a dreamy, reflective moment. The printed photograph retains the transcendent quality, opening a window for the viewer. “That fingernail,” he says of the glowing detail stemming from Armatura, “is a tiny spark of hope.”