Library Book- Michael Ayi

Marcos Lopez in an Argentine photographer. He has been taking pictures since 1978. His first published photo book was in 1993.The name of that book was called “ Retratos”. It was in this book where he first started investigating with color and develops the Latin Pop series Since then, he published “Pop Latino” and “Pop Latino Plus”. Both of these books were done solo. I liked looking at “Pop Latino Plus”. It was published in 2007, so the book is slightly recent. It was very hard to find information on this man for me. There are so many people named Marcos Lopez. Also most pages about him are in spanish. Google does not do a perfect job in translating and mostly stops the normal function of the website.

I noticed throughout the book, that most of the pictures had very vibrant colors. Very few photos did not high bright colors. I also noticed the type of photos that made appearances in the book. Most of the photos were portraits of people from his country. There were other photos of the same argentine setting yet the object in the photo was not from Argentina. For example, There was a picture of cacti in the desert. Yet, in the center the middle cactus was a pink and looked plastic. As you start from beginning to end of the book, you start to realize that the pictures get less realistic and more staged. Towards the end of the book is where the pictures began to look weird. Also, Lopez decided to use split pictures. I don’t know if split is the correct term. One photo would have two different backgrounds is what it looked like. These photos towards the end were strictly bright and colored. The use of props and weird poses was very high compared to the photos in the first half of the book. I thought the pictures in the back were comical. I also found it weird to find slight hints of American culture in the photos. For example, one photo had a man wearing a green mask from the movie “The Mask”. These types of hints of American culture were found near the end of the book. Overall, this book was very entertaining for me. My favorite picture is a portrait of a man wearing glasses. Although you can see that he is of hispanic descent, he looks so much like John Lennon. That is mostly why I liked the photo and the book as a whole.