How To Photograph Colorful La Boca
Here's how to photograph La Boca with color, shape and texture.
La Boca is a colorful and busy tourist precinct in Buenos Aires. Photographing the cobblestone streets of El Caminito was a highlight of my La Boca visit.
Buenos Aires is a vibrant city with a rich culture and a proud history. I particularly enjoyed exploring and photographing the famous La Recoleta Cemetery and the tourist precincts of La Boca and San Telmo.
The architectural detail above is a favorite of mine from my visit to La Boca. From my point of view it’s a formal study in composition exploring color, shape, line and texture.
But it’s also a positive comment celebrating the beauty and humor brought to this locale by the good folk who live there.
Buenos Aires gets quite a bit of bad press. It’s not the safest place in the world, but it has a lot to offer the group tourist or the experienced and alert solo travel.
I very much wanted to celebrate what’s great about La Boca and I hope this photo goes some way towards doing that.
Things To Do In La Boca
There’s lots of things to do in La Boca including the following:
Fundación PROA which is an art foundation exhibiting cutting-edge national and international artists.
Museo de bellas antes de La Boca showcasing the work of artists like Benito Quinquela Martín.
Museum histórico de sera displays wax reconstructions of historical figures and dioramas featuring scenes from Argentine history.
View Casa Amarilla (i.e., Yellow House) is a replica of the residence of William Brown. The Irish-born admiral fought in the wars of Independence and is credited with creating Argentina’s first navy.
Feria de Artesanos Caminito is a great place to watch Tango dancers. Highly recommended!
Usina Del Arte is an early 20th Century electrical power plant that now functions as an arts venue and gallery space.
Photographing through wire explores the notion of whether La Boca is safe.
Is La Boca Safe?
My view of La Boca is based upon the small area I visited, one that’s been prettied up for tourists.
La Boca is a working class area with a tightly packed cluster of attractions near the Riachuelo River.
My understanding is that, outside of the tourist area, La Boca is a poor part of town where theft and low level crime are common place.
Pick pocketing can be a problem in La Boca so make sure you guard your money and consider leaving important credit cards and most of your cash in your hotel room’s safe.
Our taxi driver dropped us off on the edge of the tourist area and what we saw was pretty seedy and quite edgy.
With that in mind, and after reading reports from other travelers, I think that when visiting La Boca it’s best to stick with the busier, tourist area.
I also advice you to make sure you don’t lose your way and find yourself wandering outside of that area.
If you stay where the tourist action is you’ll likely have a lot of fun exploring and making photos. I sure did.
Photography Shapes The Story You Tell
“Photography is a very powerful visual medium. Within a mere fraction of a second a certain kind of truth can be created, an opinion or viewpoint recorded.”
As visual story tellers we photographers control the way a story is told. We create our own truth.
It’s true that we deal with the information in front of our lens. However, there’s ways by which we can determine how a subject is represented and how a story is told.
Here’s a few approaches you can use to influence how your viewer reads and responds to the images you create.
Changing the viewpoint from which the photo is made by photographing from above, below or at eye level.
Changing the camera to subject distance.
Changing the ratio between the camera to subject distance compared to the distance between the camera and background.
Moving around the subject to find a more interesting composition.
Employing a polarizing filter to enhance color saturation.
Using a ND filter to achieve a long exposure for creative blur.
Making significant changes to the lens focal length at which the image is made.
Enhancing the image on the computer (e.g., highly saturated color or black and white).
Using one or more elements of composition to achieve a visually interesting result.
As a case in point my decision to photograph the colorful street art in La Boca through a wire fence was done so as to achieve a feeling of dislocation.
Perhaps that’s not unlike the feeling of estrangement many young folk experience in our contemporary culture.
There's no doubt that the decisions we make, when constructing our images, influence the viewer's interpretation of the subjects, scenes or events depicted.
The Genoa connection to La Boca suggested through a sign advertising pizza.
La Boca: The Genoa Connection
Apparently La Boca was settled by Italians from the city of Genoa.
I like to think that there’s still plenty of that famous Italian passion for life residing in the streets of La Boca.
Speaking of Italians, I made this very colorful image of a sign advertising pizza through the hole in a red painted wall.
I made sure I focused on the pizza sign, as that’s where I want to concentrate viewer attention, and employed a shallow depth of field to render the red wall out of focus.
Compositionally that tomato paste colored red wall acts like a frame within a frame to lead the eye to the sign.
I really like this image, though it does make me hungry.
Tourists passing a wonderful street art mural in La Boca, Buenos Aires.
Street Art in La Boca
There’s some great street art to photograph in La Boca.
I photographed these tourists from a balcony above. The particular angle of view I employed can be referred to as a birds eye viewpoint.
I remember being interested in the fantastic street art at the back of the image and wondering how the tourists passing through this space both relate to and contrast with the characters portrayed in the mural.
I’ve long been interested in photographs that explore the notion of similarities and differences.
I think it’s important to recognize that duality is central to the Human Condition.
Photos that examine similarities and differences between the subjects, shapes, colors and other visual elements within your photos make for visually interesting and emotionally evocative images.
Faded football poster on a cafe wall in the La Boca precinct.
Football and Argentina’s Faded Glory
Football is such a wildly popular sport in Argentina. Some refer to it as a religion, given the passion and open hysteria with which the most fervent supporters approach the game.
I found this faded poster on the wall of a cafe in La Boca.
For me it stands as a metaphor for the faded glory of Argentina, as evidenced in the dilapidated condition of many of Buenos Aires once grand buildings.
But that's not to say it's not a beautiful city. It most certainly is.
Statue of a mother holding a baby in La Boca, Buenos Aires.
Photographing Statues In La Boca
I love photographing statues and found several wonderful examples while walking the streets of La Boca.
The above image is a detail of a mother cradling a baby. I believe the image refers to the Madonna and Child.
I've maintained the very subtle color of the original statue, while working to enhance the fine details in the image.
It may look like a black and white rendering, but it's the subtle warm color of the near white tones in the image that I find most appealing.
Colorful bust against a blue wall at La Boca in Buenos Aires.
La Boca Is A World Of Color
By contrast, the sickly green of this statue against a vibrant blue background is a radical departure from our Madonna and Child statue.
I think it's fair to say that, with the exception of most portrait photography, if you're going to make color photos then color should be the dominant compositional element within those images.
Color can be subtle and de-saturated (i.e., pastel) as in the above image of the Madonna and Child.
Alternatively, color can be vividly saturated as in the image of our green skin friend.
Either way, color is important. It’s often the first element of composition that people recognize in a photo.
Compose your image around color, and the relationship between colors in the image, and your photos will improve.
Statue of football legend Diego Maradona in Caminito, La Boca.
Caminito La Boca
Caminito is the most famous street in La Boca.
Tourists flock here to see the brightly painted houses which harken back to the tenement shacks that were once typical in the neighborhood.
The houses are covered in corrugated zinc and were originally painted with leftover paint that Genoese port workers got from their ships.
It’s possible to watch tango dancing and musicians performing from the busy bars and coffee shops in Caminito.
Speaking of music Caminito, which translates as little path, was named after a 1926 tango song about a lost love.
The song is said to have been inspired by the famous La Boca artist, Benito Quinquela Martín.
One of the more touristy things to do in Caminito is to search out and photograph the following statues:
Juan and Eva Perón, Argentina’s former president and his equally famous wife
Che Guevara, perhaps the world’s most famous revolutionary
Football legend Diego Maradona
I remember the genius, Diego Maradona, particularly during the Argentinian national football team's epic 1986 World Cup campaign.
After initially being surprised to see the statue of Maradona, on the balcony of a tourist shop in La Boca, I just had to photograph it.
It's interesting that the statue of Maradona is placed where it is, one floor above street level.
That means passers by have to look up to see it in much the same way we're often required to look up at monarchs, religious and political leaders.
The art of manipulation lives on.
La Boca tango dancers performing outside a restaurant on Caminito street.
La Boca Tango
I made this snap of Tango dancers while waiting for a feed in a busy La Boca restaurant.
My friends and I were enjoying the shade, on our outside table, provided by an overhanging umbrella.
I had my camera ready to go, but the scene was very tight with folks passing in front of the camera and on either side of the dancers.
I think my timing was quite good, as far as recording their expressions and body movement, but I do wish I hadn’t chopped their feet off.
It looks a bit awkward, which is disappointing.
Unfortunately the Tango dancers finished not long after we arrived, but I was very impressed with their skills and really enjoyed watching their performance.
It was a fun and worthwhile tourist experience and I made sure I tipped them.
Argentina is a very large country with spectacular and varied landscapes and a capital city with a rich and grand history.
Argentinian people are resilient and certainly possess that famous latin vest for life. I find it infectious.
As Argentina is one of the best places from which to visit Antarctica I may well return there again.
If I do I’II be sure to explore more of the wonders of the country and its capital city, Buenos Aires.
Would I return to La Boca?
Absolutely! I was ill when I visited and I only had a few hours there. Perhaps my next visit will allow for a day or two to better explore this fascinating Buenos Aries neighborhood.
