David Galph
Photography by Juan David Galvis · Bogotá · Boston · San Francisco
Photography by Juan David Galvis · Bogotá · Boston · San Francisco
Every city I have lived in got the same treatment: I walk it until it stops posing. San Francisco is the current chapter.
The Andes raised my eye. Fog that erases the horizon, coffee at sunrise, roads that argue with the mountain. This is where the archive begins.
Since 2018 I have photographed ten trips across the United States and Colombia. Each one gets its own gallery on the Travel page; this is the index.
A short selection kept as works, the frames I would hang on a wall. Each plate says what it is, where, and when.
Portraits made where people actually live: on the street, at night, in whatever light was left. No seamless paper, no instructions.
Studio discipline, lookbooks on location and runway nerves. One look, one light, and a walk you only get once.
Product photography from the studio years, for brands with something you can hold. If it can be held, it can be lit: leather, coffee, kraft, wool and steel.
The camera also moves. Two brand films and four reels from the studio years: belts, yerba mate and tequila.
Macondo
Brand film · Macondo Belts
HBR
Brand film · Horseback Ridge
Matena
Reel · Yerba mate
Mates
Reel · Matena
Silver vs Reposado
Reel · Real Zepeda
Mezcal vs Tequila
Reel · Real Zepeda
One wedding holds everything at once: portraits, still life, land and light that will not repeat. Shot quietly, from inside the day, between 2019 and 2024.
I bought my first camera in California in 2018, halfway through a road trip with my dad across the United States, one coast first and then the other. I could not have known that seven years later I would be living in that same state, in a completely different life, or that the camera would quietly change the course of mine.
The camera came home to Bogotá. When the pandemic closed the city, it became a studio, the studio became forty-some brands, and photography became the first thing I ever built from zero.
These days it points at personal projects: the cities I move through, the Colombian highlands I come from, and the people I find in both. David Galph is the archive of that work, kept deliberately, shown without a pitch.
The rest of me lives at davidgalvis.com: the work in enterprise technology, the three cities, the longer story.
New work appears first on Instagram.