Diego Javier Luis’ passion for photography ignited in a single moment: when he received a camera for his college graduation.
Luis, now Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor in the Department of History, took that digital micro 4/3 Olympus along to his new job in China and has been creating documentary photography ever since, wherever his research takes him, including Cuba, the Philippines, and the U.S.-Mexico border.
The camera, he says, becomes a conduit for him to engage with the people and spaces he visits and to learn what people there care about, infusing his scholarly work with tactile layers of understanding. “As a historian, I firmly believe that the kinds of things that you learn in a place outside of the archive itself are often just as important as the things that you learn when you consult documents inside the archive,” Luis says.
Luis, who’s since updated to a Nikon D850 DSLR, shoots landscapes and performance art; architecture and festivals. He often edits his photos to be black and white. Outside of technical basics, what he looks for, he says, is “emotional spark.”
“There’s something pre-critical that you see that resonates with you before your analytical mind can categorize it or grasp it or put it into context,” he says. “There’s a very human relationship that you experience between yourself and what you’re hoping to capture in the camera.”
Photography by Diego Javier Luis
