Frank Blazquez
lives in Albuquerque, NM
born in Chicago, IL
frankblazquez.com | @and_frank13
“My photos illustrate the blood pumping through Albuquerque,” Frank Blazquez told the Guardian in 2018. The portraits—largely captured along the east-west belt of Central Avenue—capture human faces, yes, but each carries a story in and of itself. Stories are clearly something Blazquez is adept at working with, also documenting them in the ongoing series of short documentaries, Duke City Diaries. In only a few moments, each allows the subjects to share a chapter or two of their story as they move through the parts of the city where their lives have played out.
‘My photos illustrate the blood pumping through Albuquerque’
Photography seems like a natural fit for a former optician, though Blazquez’s earnest witnessing of the truths of others and the stories that underlie them has rare thrust. Chicago-born and living in Albuquerque since 2010, Blazquez largely aims to highlight and explore the signifiers of urban life in modern New Mexico as represented in street culture. His series Barrios de Nuevo Mexico: Southwest Stories of Vindication brings to bear the new iconographies of New Mexicans and maps Albuquerque into American photography in original ways. “Lens-based art,” Blazquez writes, “exhibits contemporary Nuevo Mexicanismo in its truest form.”
Blazquez’s work has been shown at SITE Santa Fe, 516 Arts, the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, and will be in Crystal Bridge’s forthcoming exhibition State of the Art 2020, February 22–May 24, 2020.
