maría luz bravo photography

In the awe of a pandemic no one was prepared to face, we find ourselves having to abruptly change our routines to a point where the human figure becomes almost a stranger to the urban environment. Covered in masks and gloves we leave the safety of our homes, suspicious of everyone around us, but at the same time eager to have any human interaction previously given for granted.

For this series of images, I capture the social desolation of the pandemic as seen equally on empty storefronts as much as in once-buzzing museums and cultural institutions. These images also show different ways in which individuals improvise in order to survive and even thrive in a simulacrum of an urban social life. In a way, through these photographs, I hope to show traces of recently gone social dynamics documenting its absence in public culture.

Even in a dormant city, how much of the empty urban space still reveals its culture. Places that we walk by on daily basis, overlooking these dynamics that are the ones that makes a city a city.