The 6 Best Street Photographers in Tampa, FL

Curious to see the work of the top Tampa street photographers? At Peerspace, we get it. Street photography encompasses a variety of styles but at its core it is meant to capture the feeling of life within a particular place. Often unposed and unscripted, street photographs are often beautiful representations of a scene exactly how the photographer found it.

The following Tampa street photographers all capture what it means to them to live within the city and each has their own specialty and style.

1. Christopher Rubin

Christopher Rubin is a Tampa photographer and educator who loves nothing more than capturing life’s fleeting moments and finding the beauty within all things. With an eye for color and form, he creates the kinds of images that can only be created in Florida. Brightly-hued sunsets, spectacularly clouded skies, and tropical flora all enhance his work.

Christopher’s street portraits bring the same sense of the area into his work, detailing the people that call this city home as well as the events that make it unique. As an always growing photographer, his work incorporates various elements of street photography, portrait work, and even commercial and video elements for a body of work that can’t be fit into just one box.

2. Marlon Torres

Some photographers are generalists, finding joy in variety. Marlon Torres is a specialist, finding his true passion in photographing the endless variety of humans going about their day to day lives. In his work as a Tampa street photographer, he endeavors to capture the details of the city and the people who bring it to life. His work is a perfect encapsulation of what he finds. He has a worldly flair to his portfolio, often traveling to capture how people all across the globe live their lives. And his work is evenly balanced to give a complete sense of the cities he finds himself in. 

Focusing on the architecture of Tampa, and other cities in which he travels gives Marlon’s photography a sense of place. It showcases what makes each place special in its own right and then he adds in the human element. His portraits are sometimes candid, a slice of life that he was able to observe just for a split second. At other times there is eye contact, a moment of connection. But each photo is a glimpse into a moment, a tiny peek into what it is like to be, and to live, in this vibrant city.

3. Raul Sanchez

Raul Sanchez is many things. He’s a Tampa street photographer, a fashion photographer, and a video artist. We love how his diverse and eclectic style is on display throughout his portfolio. Uniting his work is a documentary flair — the ability to take what is happening in front of his lens and create a comprehensive narrative arc.

Raul also doesn’t shy away from the more difficult elements of life. His work is an exploration into what it means to be human and all of the moments of pure joy and hardship that come with it. He also takes the time to dive deeply into the city, its beauty, and its stumbling blocks. The result is a body of work that gives a full view of what being in the city is like.

4. Ricardo Groenke

Ricardo Groenke loves photographing people, whether it’s finely crafted headshots for corporate clients or spontaneous street photography. In fact, his true love is showing his viewers who his subjects are. He learned to love photography through his father. He impressed upon Ricardo the importance of savoring moments while they happen and also preserving them to revisit later, and he carries that same ethos today.

Working to document people as they are through his street photography, he captures candid unscripted moments. These are moments where the light perfectly sculpts the subject, or where their feelings are written on their faces. Ricardo also creates travel-style street photography, where a connection with their viewer and inspiring a sense of curiosity is paramount. Always celebrating the uniqueness of faces as well as the diversity of life, his work has the feeling of someone who loves to celebrate humanity, in all of its beautiful forms.

5. Susan Louise Anderson

Susan Louise Anderson is a contributor to Edge of Humanity Magazine, an online platform “committed to publishing the human condition, the raw diverse global entanglement, with total impartiality”. Her street photography explores this concept with perfect objectivity. Her work captures a jubilant event held downtown and people going about their day-to-day activities. We also see small tableaus where elements of subject, light, and background suddenly converge for one glorious moment.

Susan’s pieces are generally colorful, a sometimes jarring juxtaposition with her somber or emotional subjects. When she does use black and white, it is to focus the viewer’s concentration on the emotion of the image, whether that emotion is joy or anger or something in between. A documentarian of the city for decades, her work sometimes transports the viewer to the past. It’s the bygone days of the city, and it is her ability to look at the city with an unflinching gaze that we love.

6. Matthew McCabe

Matthew McCabe is one of the most promising up-and-coming Tampa street photographers, documenting life as he sees it and enjoying the process along the way. His subjects tend to be colorful slices of life as well as colorful slices of the city in general.

Getting up close to his human subjects, he creates a sense of intimacy and a feeling that they have dropped their guard, just for a moment. Matthew often uses elements of the city around him to create tension and drama within the scene including window reflections and architecture. He also uses in-camera techniques to add a sense of mystery. Eager to show us his world, Matthew is a playful creator — a photographer who doesn’t just document scenes, he helps craft them so we see exactly what he wants us to see.

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