FRAMES Photography Podcast with Xiomaro

In today’s episode, W. Scott Olsen speaks with Xiomaro, an internationally exhibited photographer whose work blends historically grounded images of iconic places with candid street photography that treats everyday urban life as future history.

You can listen to this interview using our podcast player below, but we strongly encourage you to subscribe to the podcast in your podcast app so that you don’t miss any future show episodes.

Born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Xiomaro came to photography after an unusually wide-ranging path: he began as a musician, studied philosophy, served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Law and Politics at NYU School of Law, and later worked as a corporate litigator, entertainment attorney, and artist manager. After recovering from cancer, he turned to photography as a more personal and contemplative practice, adopting the name Xiomaro—meaning “ready for battle”—to mark that reinvention and to honor his Puerto Rican, Cuban, Spanish, and Canary Islands roots.

Today, Xiomaro is an internationally exhibited photographer, author, curator, teacher, and speaker whose work moves between candid street photography and historically focused images of landmarks, national parks, and endangered places. His New York photographs often use reflections and layered surfaces to create an abstract, slightly surreal feeling, while his historical and architectural projects bring a poetic, carefully observed sensibility to sites of cultural memory; his work has appeared in venues ranging from Harvard University and National Park Service exhibitions to galleries and international shows, and has drawn coverage from outlets including The New York Times and PBS.