MARK ALVAREZ is a contemporary photographer and the current Treasurer of Cambridge Open Studios. Discouraged from pursuing the arts at an early age, he returned to creative practice decades later; after purchasing a camera, he set out to be ‘the best photographer I could be’. He credits the COS community with inspiring and supporting him to develop his practice: encouraged by other local artists – members of COS – he opened his studio to the public for the first time during the July Festival, and was overwhelmed by the positive response. What began as a personal project has blossomed into his professional practice, as Mark Z Alvarez Photography.
Entirely self-taught, Mark cites Ansell Adams, Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier Bresson as his major influences. He has exhibited internationally – from France to Brazil – and been featured in Black + White Photography Magazine.
While Mark travels extensively to find interesting locations for his photography, he is emphatically not a ‘travel photographer’: his work ‘sits at the intersection of fine-art landscape photography and emotional storytelling, often evoking tranquillity, melancholy, or a sense of stepping into an alternate reality’. The images are dream-like, almost placeless, carefully composed in order ‘to stimulate the viewer's imagination’; his combined use of monochrome and long exposure techniques ‘helps to strip scenes down to their emotional and structural essence’.
Mark is represented by The FTSQ Gallery.