Contemporary Latin American photography is having a difficult-to-define moment. That may be precisely what makes it interesting.
The region has long produced photographers who turned their cameras toward politics, inequality, migration, and identity. Those subjects haven’t disappeared. But many of today’s most compelling photographers are complicating the relationship between image and representation itself: Who gets photographed? Who controls the narrative? And what happens when documentary photography intersects with fashion, ecology, spirituality, or performance?
PhotoVogue’s 2025 Latin American Panorama selected 42 photographers and video makers from the region and its diaspora, spanning environmental, documentary, and fashion photography. More than 27,000 images had been submitted to the project’s open call.
For World Photography Day, these four artists offer four very different answers to what Latin American photography can look like now.
Citlali Fabián: Changing Who Controls the Image
In April, Mexican photographer Citlali Fabián was named Photographer of the Year at the 2026 Sony World Photography Awards for Bilha, Stories of My Sisters. Fabián, a visual artist from Oaxaca’s Yalalteca Indigenous community, built the series collaboratively around Indigenous women who are artists, activists, musicians, educators, and defenders of language and territory.
The portraits are then transformed through Fabián’s digital illustrations. An Ayuujk linguist appears alongside generations of women who shaped her; a Triqui activist is given symbolic wings; a climate activist stands with ancestors and future generations.
The distinction matters. These aren’t photographs attempting to explain Indigenous communities to outsiders. They’re images built from within those communities, with subjects participating in how their stories are represented.
Elliot & Erick Jiménez: Bringing Spirituality Into Fashion’s Frame
For Cuban American twins Elliot and Erick Jiménez, photography moves between fashion, fine art, and Afro-Caribbean spirituality.
Raised in Miami by Cuban immigrants, the brothers grew up within the Lucumí tradition. Their first solo museum exhibition, El Monte, at Pérez Art Museum Miami, used staged photography, mixed media, and installation to reinterpret that spiritual inheritance through the Western art canon.
Their commercial reach is equally significant. In 2023, they photographed Bad Bunny for TIME’s first entirely Spanish-language cover in its 100-year history. Their ability to move between global celebrity culture and deeply personal cultural history suggests that commercial and artistic photography no longer need to occupy separate worlds.
Isadora Romero: Expanding What Documentary Photography Can See
Ecuadorian photographer Isadora Romero won the Environment category at the same 2026 Sony awards with Notes on How to Build a Forest, developed in Ecuador’s Mache Chindul and Yunguilla territories.
Romero doesn’t simply photograph forests. Working with local communities, scientists, and researchers, she combines documentary photography with infrared, thermal, and pinhole techniques, even allowing fungi to intervene in community archives. The project asks viewers to imagine how other organisms might perceive the forest.
The result pushes environmental photography away from pristine landscapes and toward something more complicated: ecosystems as cultural territories shaped by relationships between human and nonhuman life.
Camila Falquez: Rewriting Who Gets to Look Monumental
Born in Mexico to Colombian parents, raised in Spain, and based in New York, Camila Falquez embodies another dimension of contemporary Latinidad: identity constructed across borders.
Falquez borrows the elaborate staging, saturated color, and visual authority of fashion photography, then directs that language toward people historically excluded from its definitions of beauty. She paints sets, builds props, and constructs portraits that can feel closer to monuments than editorials.
Her independent project Being extended that idea beyond galleries by installing portraits in Manhattan storefronts and public spaces, while her work now sits in MoMA’s collection. In 2023, she was named Fashion Photographer of the Year at the Latin American Fashion Awards.
Taken together, these photographers resist an easy definition of “Latin American photography.” That resistance is the point. The most exciting development isn’t a new regional aesthetic, but something more powerful: a generation increasingly determining for itself who gets seen, how they’re seen, and who gets to make the image.
