Growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico I was exposed at an early age to the image-making world by my photographer father. As with many people of his generation who were pressured by their parents to follow a more “traditional” career path, he hung up his psychology diploma and uprooted himself to attend Art Center in Pasadena, California. To this day he is still practicing photography in Puerto Rico.
However it wasn't until my final year in high school that I considered the idea of also becoming a photographer, and upon completion I embarked on the start of my artistic studies at SCAD university in beautiful Savannah, Georgia. Trading the cobblestone streets of San Juan for the ones in Savannah proved beyond fruitful as I not only fell in love with this majestic and old Anglo-Saxon city, but I was also exposed to a wonderful group of peers who inspired me to cultivate my craft to new levels. Nevertheless it was after a month long stint in New York City, following the end of my junior year of college, that I determined that to elevate my craft even further I needed to make the move in to the city upon completing my degree in Savannah.
It was at that very moment I realized that my then current goals in life were all solely business and career driven. This is when I decided to set a personal goal of traveling to all the seven continents before reaching the age of 30. The body of personal work you see is on this site is a life long project, the first phase called Holocene, which documents images of people, places and things that I find are somewhat on the fringes of our immediate world that will unlikely survive the test of time. I hope to remind people of the aspects surrounding them that they may not only overlook, but may not also reflect upon.
During the seemingly Quixote proposition of traveling to all seven continents during my early and mid 20s, I kept on pursuing my fondness for commercial photography which I have always appreciated and deeply enjoyed. It is a true blast to focus on personal work, but it is also extremely rewarding to collaborate and bond with people on a common goal and vision through the medium of advertising.
This site contains the images that have melded a personal and professional body of work that together I hope will resonate with you in some shape and form.
Please contact me at jose@marquezphoto.com for any questions, comments and even critiques.