Greg Urbano photography

Entanglement: Portrait as Performance at the Haunt Slam

During the 2025 Portrait Slam in Denver, a striking portrait of a model named Wednesday showcases the photographer’s evolution into theatrical portraiture. The image, emphasizing themes of entrapment and performance, uses sophisticated artificial lighting to create dramatic effects. It reflects a shift towards collaborative photography, merging documentation with creative expression.

Portrait of a person pressing their hands forward through layers of stretched web-like material, with dramatic low-key lighting against a dark background. — Wednesday photographed during the 2025 Portrait Slam (Haunt Slam) at the DCO space in Denver, Colorado.

This striking portrait, captured during the 2025 Portrait Slam at Denver’s DCO space, represents a significant departure into theatrical portraiture for a photographer whose journey has increasingly embraced collaborative, event-based work. The image—featuring a model known as Wednesday—transcends conventional portraiture to become a study in entrapment, theatrical expression, and the controlled chaos of performance photography.

The composition immediately arrests the viewer with its central tension: a figure ensnared in what appears to be synthetic webbing, hands pressed outward in a gesture simultaneously defensive and reaching. The model’s expression—mouth open in what could be read as exhilaration, distress, or performative intensity—refuses easy interpretation. This ambiguity serves the work well, inviting prolonged examination rather than immediate comprehension.

Technically, the photograph demonstrates sophisticated command of artificial lighting in challenging circumstances. Shot with a Nikon Z7ii and illuminated by a Godox AD100 with grid, the lighting scheme creates dramatic chiaroscuro that sculpts the figure from the deep, nearly black background. The gridded modifier produces focused illumination that highlights the face and hands while allowing the surrounding webbing to catch light selectively, creating a three-dimensional mesh that appears to hover in space. This precision lighting transforms what could be simple event documentation into controlled studio-quality portraiture executed in a dynamic environment.

The web itself functions as both literal and metaphorical element. Its physical presence creates visual texture and geometric complexity, the crossing strands forming a secondary compositional structure that both fragments and frames the subject. Metaphorically, it invites reading as constraint, connection, or cocoon—interpretations that align with the “Haunt Slam” context while transcending mere Halloween theatrics to suggest broader themes of entanglement with technology, society, or creative process itself.

Within Chapter 6—”The Road Ahead: Recent Work & Ongoing Exploration”—this photograph signals the photographer’s continued engagement with collaborative, community-centered photography. The Portrait Slam format, hosted by Denver Models and Mike’s Camera, represents a democratization of studio portraiture, bringing together photographers, models, and creative collaborators in rapid-fire shooting sessions. That he selected this image for his Top 100 Journey suggests recognition that contemporary photographic practice increasingly exists within networks of creative exchange rather than isolated studio work.

The post-processing in Evoto maintains dramatic impact while preserving textural detail in both skin tones and the surrounding webbing. The color palette—dominated by deep teals and shadows punctuated by warm skin tones and crimson lips—creates visual coherence without sacrificing the image’s raw energy. The photographer resists over-polishing, allowing slight imperfections and authentic texture to ground the theatrical presentation in physical reality.

This work demonstrates evolution from earlier documentary and landscape work toward portraiture that embraces performance, collaboration, and conceptual staging. Yet it retains the technical rigor and compositional awareness evident throughout the Top 100 Journey. As the photographer continues exploring “the road ahead,” this image suggests that path leads toward increasingly theatrical, collaborative work that blurs boundaries between documentation and creation, between capturing moments and constructing them.

Through the Looking Glass: A Meditation on Medium and Moment

A glass sphere is used to refract and invert the final print issue of Digital Photographer magazine in a still life composition that explores themes of perception, preservation, and the transition from analog to digital media. The work reflects on the obsolescence of print, intertwining technical prowess with a thoughtful commentary on photography’s evolution.

Glass sphere placed over a stack of photography magazines, magnifying and inverting the “Digital Photographer” cover through refraction. — A glass sphere refracts and inverts photography magazines, including the final print issue of Digital Photographer, photographed for the 52 Frames “Through the Looking Glass” challenge.

In this carefully orchestrated still life, the photographer employs a glass sphere as both subject and optical instrument, creating a work that functions simultaneously as technical demonstration and elegiac commentary on the evolution of print media. The composition centers on a crystal orb that inverts and refracts the image of Digital Photographer magazine—specifically, its final print edition—transforming a moment of cultural transition into a study of perception, preservation, and the inevitable passage of analog traditions into digital memory.

The technical execution reveals a photographer comfortable with the complexities of refractive optics. The sphere acts as a lens within the lens, compressing the magazine’s cover into a miniaturized, inverted world that paradoxically sharpens our attention to what might otherwise be overlooked. The purple masthead, readable despite its reversal, anchors the composition with bold color, while the surrounding magazines create a layered backdrop that suggests abundance even as the image mourns scarcity. The decision to flip certain magazines for the “extra credit of refraction” demonstrates a playful engagement with the assignment’s constraints, yet this playfulness does not diminish the work’s underlying melancholy.

What elevates this photograph beyond mere technical exercise is its timing and intentionality. The artist notes he possessed this glass sphere for years before deploying it—a detail that speaks to the patience required in photographic practice, the waiting for subject and tool to find their proper alignment. That this alignment occurred during the week Digital Photographer ceased print publication transforms the image into an unintentional requiem, a visual preservation of a medium announcing its own obsolescence.

Within Chapter 6 of the Top 100 Journey—titled “The Road Ahead: Recent Work & Ongoing Exploration”—this photograph occupies particularly rich territory. The chapter’s title suggests forward momentum, yet this image looks both forward and backward simultaneously. The glass sphere, an ancient optical device, refracts contemporary printed matter about digital photography, creating a temporal layering that mirrors the photographer’s position at a crossroads between mastered techniques and emerging possibilities. The work acknowledges what is being left behind even as it demonstrates facility with the tools of the present.

The composition’s formal qualities reward extended viewing. The shallow depth of field isolates the sphere against the deliberately blurred magazine stack, creating spatial hierarchy while maintaining contextual legibility. The lighting, presumably controlled given the studio-like precision of the setup, wraps around the sphere’s curved surface without harsh reflections, suggesting either diffused natural light or carefully positioned artificial sources. The wooden surface beneath provides warmth and texture, grounding the optical trickery in tangible materiality.

Conceptually, the photograph engages with themes of representation and mediation that recur throughout photographic history. The sphere presents the magazine not as it is, but as refracted, inverted, compressed—much as photography itself presents the world not as direct experience but as mediated image. This self-reflexive quality, combined with the specific poignancy of documenting a publication’s final issue, positions the work within broader conversations about photography’s relationship to preservation, memory, and loss.

As the photographer continues his ongoing exploration, this image suggests an artist increasingly interested in photography that thinks about photography—work that acknowledges the medium’s materiality, history, and transformations while demonstrating technical mastery that never becomes mere showmanship.

Under Naples Pier at Sunset: Architecture Meets the Ethereal

Greg Urbano’s long exposure photograph beneath Naples Pier captures the interplay of human architecture and nature, highlighting time and impermanence. Shot with meticulous technique, the image transforms a familiar locale into a contemplative space where smooth Gulf waters contrast with weathered pilings, emphasizing Florida’s geography and the enduring power of the natural world.

Long exposure photograph taken beneath the Naples Pier in Florida, showing weathered support columns receding into the distance with smooth, blurred water and soft sunset light. — Long exposure view beneath the Naples Pier in Florida, captured with softened water and warm evening light.

In Greg Urbano’s exploration of Florida’s coastal landscapes, this long exposure beneath Naples Pier represents a masterful convergence of structural geometry and natural fluidity. The photograph transforms a familiar tourist destination into something altogether more contemplative—a meditation on time, permanence, and the quiet persistence of natural forces.

The technical execution reveals deliberate artistic choices that elevate the image beyond documentary. Shot at a 30-second exposure with an aperture of ƒ/10, Urbano allows the Gulf waters to smooth into an almost supernatural plane of silk, while the pier’s wooden pilings remain sharply rendered, their weathered surfaces recording years of salt spray and tidal rhythms. The ISO 100 setting preserves exceptional clarity in both the concrete deck overhead and the barnacle-encrusted bases of each column, where marine life has claimed the structure as its own.

What distinguishes this photograph within the Florida Landscapes & Cityscapes chapter is its unique vantage point. Rather than capturing the pier from the beach or along its walkway—the conventional approaches—Urbano positions himself in the liminal space beneath, where human architecture and marine environment intersect. This perspective creates a vanishing point that draws the eye through the repetitive columns, suggesting infinity while simultaneously framing the horizon in measured increments. The composition speaks to Florida’s essential character: a place where human development exists in constant negotiation with water, weather, and an environment that ultimately cannot be controlled.

The color palette captures that transitional moment when day surrenders to evening. Soft blues dominate the frame, punctuated by warmer tones filtering through the gaps between pilings where the setting sun still reaches. The long exposure has rendered a handful of beachgoers as ghostly presences, barely perceptible in the distance—a reminder that even in this serene moment, human activity continues, though made insignificant by the photograph’s emphasis on timelessness over immediacy.

The textural contrasts throughout the frame reward sustained viewing. The smooth, almost liquid sand in the foreground shows subtle patterns from receding water, while the pier pilings display years of weathering—concrete cracking and staining, wooden supports silvered by sun and salt. Most striking are the organic clusters clinging to each column where water regularly submerges them, dark masses of mussels and barnacles that testify to the structure’s dual existence above and below the tideline.

This image exemplifies why Urbano selected Naples Pier for inclusion in his exploration of Florida’s diverse landscapes. The state’s geography is defined by its relationship with water—the Atlantic, the Gulf, the Everglades, countless rivers and springs. Here, that relationship is made architectural, structured, yet the photograph ultimately reveals nature’s quiet supremacy. The pier may impose order with its regular spacing and engineered strength, but the barnacles reclaim it, the water smooths away footprints, and time—made visible through long exposure—reveals the impermanence of even our most solid constructions.

Within the broader context of the Top 100 Journey, this photograph demonstrates Urbano’s ability to find fresh perspectives on familiar subjects, transforming a popular sunset location into a study of geometry, time, and the persistent dialogue between built and natural environments that defines Florida’s coastal identity.

Marie Selby Roots, 2012

In Greg Urbano’s 2012 black and white photograph of banyan tree roots at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, the ordinary is elevated to extraordinary. Using a Nikon D5100, he emphasizes natural architecture and texture, inviting viewers to appreciate the monumental presence of the roots and their intricate details, symbolizing persistence and growth.

Black‑and‑white close‑up photograph of large banyan tree roots spreading across the ground at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, taken with a Nikon D5100. — A 2012 black‑and‑white photograph of banyan tree roots at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida.

In the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens of Sarasota, Florida, Greg Urbano discovered a subject that speaks to photography’s essential pursuit: finding extraordinary vision in the ordinary world. His 2012 image of a banyan tree’s root system transforms what many visitors might walk past into a study of natural architecture, texture, and the quiet monumentality of growth.

Shot on a Nikon D5100 at 18mm, the photograph embraces the wide-angle perspective to emphasize the sculptural sprawl of roots as they emerge from and return to the earth. The technical choices here are deliberate—an aperture of ƒ/4.5 provides sufficient depth of field to keep the intricate root structures sharp from foreground to middle ground, while the 1/80s shutter speed at ISO 100 captures clean detail in what appears to be soft, overcast light. The conversion to black and white strips away the distraction of color, allowing the image to become purely about form, line, and the interplay of light across weathered surfaces.

What makes this photograph compelling is its invitation to reconsider scale and presence. Banyan trees are known for their dramatic aerial root systems, which drop from branches to establish new anchor points in the soil. These roots, over time, become massive supporting structures that can make a single tree look like an entire forest. Urbano positions his lens low and close, giving these roots the monumentality they deserve. They undulate across the frame like organic highways, their surfaces marked by the patient work of decades—moss-covered in places, smooth and silvered in others, each groove and crack a record of growth and adaptation.

The composition draws the eye through natural pathways. The roots create flowing curves that lead deeper into the frame, while pockets of accumulated leaves and debris provide textural contrast and visual rest stops. There’s an almost sculptural quality to the way light models the cylindrical forms, revealing their three-dimensionality through subtle gradations of gray. The photograph operates on multiple levels: as documentation of a specific botanical specimen, as an abstract study of natural form, and as a meditation on time, persistence, and the hidden infrastructure that supports visible life.

Within the context of the Top 100 Journey project, this image represents the photographer’s developing eye for architectural elements in nature. The banyan’s root system is, after all, a kind of natural architecture—functional, structural, and beautiful in its purposeful design. The black and white treatment connects this work to photography’s documentary traditions while simultaneously elevating the subject into the realm of fine art.

There’s something humbling about standing before such a root system, and Urbano’s photograph captures that sense of being in the presence of something both ancient and ongoing. These roots speak to persistence, to the slow but inexorable way living things claim their space in the world. The photographer’s choice to work at ground level, to get close and look carefully, reveals a fundamental photographic truth: the world rewards sustained attention. What appears as mere roots at first glance becomes, through the lens, a landscape unto itself—complex, textured, and worthy of extended contemplation.

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