Adam Alonzo has been taking photos every day for 20 years, and every day he shares five new photos on his website.
Alonzo spoke with WYSO’s Jason Reynolds while taking pictures downtown on his lunch break.
JASON REYNOLDS: You've been shooting downtown for 20 years. How do you keep it fresh?
ADAM ALONZO: That's the challenge. I try to always keep an eye on details. It's just a matter of what's different today or what's happening that isn't going to be here for very long. Like this tree right here is about to bloom. That's something that I look forward to: the seasonal changes. I kind of consider myself to be a nature photographer in the city. In fact, we're heading down to Riverscape right now just to get a look at what might be going on at the river with birds, people on bikes, and that type of thing.
REYNOLDS: But before we can make it down to the river, Alonzo spots a couple small yellow flowers.
ALONZO: Okay, so here we go. The first daffodils of the season. It's not going to be a calendar photo, but it's my first daffodil, literally, of this year. So, I'm going to just stop and get a couple of shots of this. I'll come by again next week and there'll be a whole lot more. It's just a little bit of the seasonal process that I always try to look for.
There's a falcon that lives in one of these tall buildings. Even in the middle of the street noise, I can hear the falcon screeching way above, and I can get good pictures of it wheeling around among the tall buildings. As far as the bird is concerned, it's living on the side of a cliff, but to me, it's a building.
REYNOLDS: When we get through those buildings and down to the river, there are seagulls on the edge of the water, and kayakers out on the water, paddling against the tide.
ALONZO: If I can get close without spooking these gulls, I can get paddleboarders in the background and gulls in the foreground.
REYNOLDS: It's a great place to shoot.
ALONZO: Yeah, I come here very often. Even in the middle of winter when there's nobody here but me, there's something going on, even if it's ice kind of cracking along the side of the river. Or tracks in the snow, animal tracks.
I'll come down here a lot of times in the fall, and I can stand here and just watch monarch butterflies as they're heading south towards Mexico for the winter.
So, it's just a reminder to me that I'm part of a bigger system. Nature is still functioning even here in the middle of the city. It's a nice reminder of my place in the world.
REYNOLDS: How many photos have you taken by now do you think?
ALONZO: Well, the photos that I have displayed on my website, I have five per day. And so that works out to like 36,000 right now. But in terms of the photos that I've taken and I've not displayed, I can't even imagine. If I'm shooting pictures of an event, I could take thousands of photos in one day.
I love interaction between people, genuine responses on people's faces. For instance, there was recently a high school alumni event that I photographed. It wasn't even my high school. I was just there to take pictures. And one student, Steve Bognar, the Oscar-winning filmmaker, came to that event because his teacher was being honored. And he walked up to the teacher before the event even started. He gave the teacher a box, and there's a tiny Oscar statuette. And Steve Bogner told the teacher, “I am a filmmaker because of you.”
And to get that interaction—to be there with my camera and to record—that was priceless. That's what I love.
