An independent business is a small family owned business which provides a livelihood to the owner and his/her family. These places are full of inventiveness and hard work, but unfortunately due to our current industrialization pressures, these businesses face difficult times to survive.
With this project I want to portray the aesthetics, people and essence of these unique places. I started this project photographing mexican independent shops, their colors, marketing and overall aesthetics are very attractive to me. In the future I hope to broaden it to other cities and cultures.
<strong<Daniel Espinoza
I was born in Mexico City but before my first birthday moved with my parents to San Cristobal de Las Casas, a city in the Southern Mexican state of Chiapas.
From a young age I had my first encounters with the world of photography using a Kodak 110 camera that my father gave me when I was 5 years old and also experimenting with my father’s own camera a reflex Pentax .
When I turn15 years I returned to Mexico City, this time to study in High School and later for a degree in Industrial Engineering. During my University degree I undertook photography courses and worked in the darkroom.
In 2005 I crossed to England to study for a Masters Degree at Cambridge
University where I also participated in the Photographic Society of the University and visited numerous exhibitions of art and photography. Since then I have lived in Spain and more recently moved to Zurich, Switzerland where I currently work.
Living and working in greatly contrasting cities has without doubt influenced my interest in themes such as landscape, architecture, everyday and urban life and conceptual photography, also inspired by the work of artists like Ansel Adams, Brett Weston, William Eggleston and Lewis Baltz. For this reason I believe in the power of photography as a method of expression and communication which offers infinite forms of perception, interpretation and execution.
At the moment I am mostly working with analog photography and experimenting with different types of film. My images try to retrieve inner emotions where the observer can make his/her own interpretation according to his/her previous experiences.
