Daniel Mondragon's photostream  

Daniel Mondragon
Artist Profile

What began as a hobby four years ago has turned into a calling for twenty-one year old San Francisco native Daniel Mondragon. Almost entirely self-taught, Mondragon's photographic depictions of the city and neighborhood (the Mission district) he knows so well are permeated with a vitality and sense of purpose rarely seen in the work of artists his age. In his own words, "I love photography because it allows me to express myself. It helps me speak volumes without ever uttering a word.” Like Larry Clark with Tulsa meth-heads, and Stacy Peralta with Venice Beach skaters, Mondragon chronicles the people, places and subcultures that are unique to the world he is familiar with--the ones practically right in his backyard. Though depicting city scenes that some would consider gritty or unsavory, Mondragon's work is alluring, seductive and, most importantly, honest. He portrays his environment in an unstaged, unvarnished manner that makes no attempt to fictionalize or apologize for its coarse exterior, but instead imbues it with an intimacy that can only come from having spent his entire upbringing in it. What emerges from Mondragon's photography is a brash rejection of San Francisco's recent yuppie and hipster invasion, a youthfully defiant rebel yell against the vapid, vampiric culture-less culture that drains the city's character by the day. Mondragon's photos show that, despite an era of increasingly rampant gentrification, San Francisco's street culture has not yet been stifled. It just takes an inside man to show us where to look.