Thomas Locke Hobbs
| Hi! Thanks for visiting. I'm an American photographer living in Buenos Aires. These are photos from the blog I kept on my site from 2003 to 2009. I now have redesigned the home page to just show a portfolio of my current work. I also blog at BuenosAiresPhotographer.com where I post my baires snapshots. |
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| Planetarium in Parque Palermo
There is something about the Jetsons-like architecture along with the Araucaria tree on the left that makes this photo look like it was taken on another planet, from some 1960s Star Trek episode. Photo by Luc Garcia |
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| Disco thru the trees
Disco is a supermarket chain here and Luc took this picture across Avenida Santa Fe from the Botanical Garden. |
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| Parrilla Gonzalo on Cabrera and Billinghurst. It's a good neighborhood parrilla, cheap and unpretentious. I liked the odd mix of florescent light, deeply saturated red and chartreuse in their signage. I have to thank Luc for the picture, since it was with his camera. |
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| The zoo entrance has these paw prints in cement in the entrance. The center part of the paw is in the shape of Buenos Aires--almost. It's actually a mirror image. Does this mean that the guy who made the mold for the print forgot that the printed images is reversed? |
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| My friend Luc from Paris is visiting me here in Buenos Aires. I think his sunglasses make him look like a young Andy Warhol. |
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| There is a coin shortage in Argentina. Nobody wants to make change. You have to be strategic and horde coins for when they are absolutely necessary, like on the bus. You get good at lying, saying no tengo monedas even when it's a lie. I liked the knowning melodrama of this kiosquero´s sign in Recoleta. |
Malos Aires
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| You may have heard that Buenos Aires was covered in smoke last week. This is what it looked like from my balcony. By contrast, here is the view on a normal day: |
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| ***CAPTION*** |
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| You could see 3 or 4 blocks at the most. You need a strong telephoto lens to capture the effect. This was the best I could do. |
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| Urban Chalet style house
There's a sub-genre of house called Chalets. You don't just find them in vacation areas but in the middle of the city, like this one on Sarmiento in Almagro, a busy commercial street with heavy traffic. Ever since my first visit to Argentina in 1993 this style has struck me as bizarre and without obvious influences. An architect friend had this to say about the style: No viene de ninguna lado... es la grasada chic cara de new rich que contrata a un arquitecto amigo grasa... Sería un techo Neo Alpino, con mucho machimbre (madera de pino teñida y barnizada brilloso.... grasa, madera barata pero porque al grasa le gusta el machimbre de pino... Este New rich por lo general es comerciante del conurbano bonaerense o del once... O tienen un negocio grande y tradicional heredado de los abuelos en algun barrio que no es donde está esta casa. |
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| Avenida Olazabal 3432
The boom in residential construction, so far unaffected by the housing crisis in the US, has made it harder to find abandoned construction projects. For instance, the Electropaulo building that I photographed in 2005 is now nearly finished. My guess is that most of suspended projects, like this building around the corner from one of the poshest streets in Belgrano 'R', remain unfinished for legal, rather than economic reasons. |
Concepcion del Uruguay
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| Small cities in Argentina don't sprawl. They have the same compact urbanism of Buenos Aires albeit on a smaller scale. |
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| Finally in Buenos Aires after 19 hours on a bus. We were too tired for a night out so I ordered a dozen empanadas. |
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| Here's the view from my balcony. I rented a studio for a month and now I need to find a 1-bedroom. |
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 | Hi. I'm a 33 year-old American currently living in Buenos Aires. Before that I lived in California, Sao Paulo and New York and if you browse through the archives below you can see photos of all those places. Currently I'm posting most of my pictures on BuenosAiresPhotographer.com. I also have an old geocities page with some outdated information but also more photos of Buenos Aires, friends and my 9/11 pictures. |