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or Jorge Parra, photography and style go hand in hand. Whether he’s shooting highfashion people or high-design interiors, Parra seems instantly to turn the subject hip. Early in his career in Venezuela (he relocated to Miami three years ago), Parra benefitted from adventurous editors who looked outside of their typical niches to hire photographers who were specialized in one area to shoot something entirely different. In his case, Parra was a people shooter who was hired to tackle architectural photography. “In this era of lower budgets and acting within
Master of
The High-Style Space
Jorge Parra invites you into a place with images that are warm, engaging and human
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Not satisfied with concentrating on a specific type of photography, Jorge Parra approaches architectural design using his fashion, fine-art and lifestyle background. With a warm, stimulating look, he captures images that are intended to convey more emotionally than standard architectural shots. This sometimes means dropping conventional wisdom and going with a style that he describes as more “organic.” The focus is less about analyzing angles and proportions and more about exploring how the space should be experienced. The finished result isn’t always a technically perfect photograph, but then Parra wasn’t looking to do that anyway. Early in his career, he was hired for an architecture assignment because he mostly shot people. The idea was to get a fresh perspective by using someone who didn’t specialize in that area. The job added an entirely new dimension to his photography. Parra shoots digital, but doesn’t like to do too much to his photographs, preferring instead to let the look and feel of the textures and materials used to create a space show through.
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safe borders, it’s more difficult to find such an open approach,” Parra says of the editorial climate today. “But nonetheless, it’s still a very interesting conceptual proposal. It has called my attention ever since to a challenge: How would I perform outside my comfort zone? Thinking-out-of-thebox assignments keep me fresh. Many people say I shouldn’t say this and I should focus and market myself on an
area of specialization, but I know I’d get bored pretty fast. In order to reinvent myself, I move in different fields. I’m still perceived by some as a generalist, while in truth, I’m a specialist, working on a large field—that of lifestyle in its widest sense.” Parra performed quite well with the change of pace, and that initial architectural challenge blossomed into a whole new facet of his photography.
Now his paradigm includes high-style interiors and architectural shots, but he still puts his own unique spin on them. “My sensibility is always focused on the human factor,” Parra explains, “and this impacts the way I shoot architecture and interior design. I’d rather leave behind some of the standard methods to shoot architecture—the theory—and focus more on how to make places and spaces look inviting, digitalphotopro.com December 2008 I 115