About

I'm Abe Alirez, a photographer based in Phoenix, Arizona.

I didn't set out to have a style — I set out to take pictures wherever I ended up, which for a while meant photographing whatever was in front of me because it was in front of me. Temples, monuments, the obligatory landmark shot. Somewhere along the way I noticed the photographs I kept going back to weren't the ones of famous places. They were the ones where a person became a shape — a silhouette crossing a plaza, a figure on a bridge caught between two buildings, a rider on a camel cutting a clean line against the sky. And they were the ones where a stranger let me see something real for just a second: a man holding perfectly still on a stool outside a music hall, a kid mid-sprint up a set of bleachers, someone's reflection caught inside a wall of names.

That's what I'm chasing now. Not landmarks, not itineraries — negative space, silhouette, and the moment a person stops performing for the camera and just exists in the frame. Sometimes that happens on the other side of the world. Sometimes it happens two blocks from my house.

This site is a collection of those photographs, sorted roughly into the two things I keep coming back to: shape and space on one hand, people and character on the other. I'm still figuring out where the line between them actually is. I'm not in a hurry to find it.