Fundamentally a curious person, driven to reveal more than the human glance alone can see. Omar Vega is an award winning graphic designer and self-taught photographer. Born in Glendale, California into a loud, loving and messy immigrant Cuban family — he now lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
You could say that his path to becoming a newspaper design director began when he first became art director for his high school newspaper — because nobody else wanted to do it (and his favorite English teacher asked him nicely). But at the time, his sole passion was writing. He wanted to become a “serious journalist.”
Flash forward to the University of Miami, where he majored in journalism and English literature. On a whim he took an elective course in newspaper design—and a new passion was born.
His professional life has taken him far and wide, from Hong Kong to Boston, on a path that looks like this:
Miami Herald > The Hartford Courant > Atlanta Journal-Constitution > Wall Street Journal Asia > Atlanta Journal-Constitution > Gannett Design Studio, New Jersey > The Boston Globe.
As a photographer, it's his love and adoration for the spontaneity of human behavior that forms the foundation for his work. He strives to capture those glimmering, ephemeral moments — the ones that happen so quickly that you just almost miss them. To Omar, photography is catching — in that split-second of the shutters release — the essence of someone or some place.
“In making art, it’s not that questions lead to answers — it’s that the answers lead to the next questions, and you keep following the questions.”
— Dawoud Bey