Artist Spotlight: Joey Martinez

Joey Martinez

Joey Martinez is a long time friend of Indie and has always captured such amazing street photography. A recent order of his caught our attention — from the colors to the subjects — and we wanted to show off his work!

No matter where he was, Joey found the most beautiful scenes surrounding him. “Cuba is a place that I absolutely love to document,” he told us, “it’s literally picture perfect everywhere you look.”

These images were taken in November of 2023, Joey’s third time visiting. On this solo trip, he returned to his grandparents’ homeland. Joey’s grandmother grew up in Havana, and his grandfather only 40 minutes away. In 1963, they left for America three years into Castro’s reign during the height of the Cuban missile crisis. Joey’s dad, only six years old at the time, left Cuba on the last Pan American flight ever from Havana to Miami.

When asked about the technical side of these images, Joey said, “I use a Leica M6 with a 35mm 1.4 Summilux lens.” As far as the film stock goes, he tends to “shoot Portra 800, a lot of times I push to 1600 so I have more options throughout the day, especially in the evening.” All of his film was scanned on our Frontier.

While on his trip, Joey also ran into another street photographer, Peter Turnley, “just doing his thing in the wild.”

We hope that you enjoyed these scans as much as we have. There’s a lot more where these came from…check out more of Joey’s (incredible) work on Instagram (@joeymartinez). Some more of our favorites are shown below!