Ones to Watch 2019: Luis Alberto Rodriguez
Each year, British Journal of Photography presents its Ones To Watch – a selection of 19 emerging image-makers, chosen from a list of nearly 750 nominations. Collectively, they provide a window into where photography is heading, at least in the eyes of the curators, editors, agents, festival producers and photographers we invited to nominate. Every weekend throughout May, BJP-online is sharing profiles of the 19 photographers, originally published in the magazine. Discover more here. Luis Alberto Rodriguez was born and raised in New York, and has been a dancer his whole life. His parents emigrated from the Dominican Republic not long before he was born, his father working as a cleaner in a restaurant, and his mother in a factory, settling in an area of the city where the crack epidemic was rife and a good education was hard to come by. “I was relentless in my desire to fly away,” says Rodriguez. Enrolling on a government-funded arts programme that enabled him to go to dance school was his way out. Training first at the …