Omar Vega Photography

Photo essays featured in The Boston Globe

“Returning to a place I’d never been”

“Reckoning with my attraction to kitsch”

Latest Work

Portraits

Street

New York :: Atlanta :: Madrid :: Boston :: Barcelona :: Dublin :: Havana

Projects

Hyphen — The space between two worlds

I've spent my life balancing on the hyphen between Cuban and American, and finally decided it was time to explore my roots. And so it was that I found myself in 2016 traveling by car in Cuba. Along the way, I witnessed the daily lives of the people through dusty windows and heard stories from them wherever we stopped. I took it all in and searched for myself — my identity — in the faces and lives of strangers. It wasn't until years after the trip that I realized that I photographed the Cubans with a distance between us filled with my fears of not belonging, and my longing to belong. In the photos I made I saw their stories, and mine.

For more about this project, including the digital gallery and self-published books, click here.

Discarded Matter

These photos started out as a bunch of Instagram posts I made after noticing all the discarded masks and gloves littered in my neighborhood shortly after the start of the pandemic. This happened to coincide with a special environment themed Ideas section of The Boston Globe. I pitched these photos with a short paragraph to the editor and et voila, a photo essay was born.

Ritual/Routine

My world has been made smaller, my life more intimate. The pandemic has brought my attention to the mundaneness, the everyday-ness of life.

I mark the passing of time by my daily routines.

I find solace in the ceremony of my ritualistic habits.

And I am made grateful for ALL of it.

It’s about maintaining some sense of normalcy during extreme times.