We need to take pictures because photographers need to pick up the camera, order the elements, make adjustments with extraordinary numbers, and feel that sensation of the other, which has no owner and is unique. After all, what goes into the frame is your decision and what is left out, too.

We must take pictures because that (healthy) obsession must be fed and satiated.

"What, then, is a traveling mind-set? Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic. Receptive, we approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting. We irritate locals because we stand in traffic islands and narrow streets and admire what they take to be unremarkable small details. We risk getting run over because we are intrigued by the roof of a government building or an inscription on a wall. We find a supermarket or a hairdresser's shop unusually fascinating. We dwell at length on the layout of a menu or the clothes of the presenters on the evening news. We are alive to the layers of history beneath the present and take notes and photographs. Home, by contrast, finds us more settled in our expectations. We feel assured that we have discovered everything interesting about our neighborhood, primarily by virtue of our having lived there a long time. It seems inconceivable that there could be anything new to find in a place where we have been living for a decade or more. We have become habituated and therefore blind to it." --Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel (2002)

Why downtown miami?

Mana is the largest property owner in Downtown Miami, owning over 70 buildings in and around Flagler Street with plans to transform the area into a business campus. The centerpiece of the redevelopment — the Nikola Tesla Innovation Hub, a 13-story office complex at 155 S Miami Avenue — remains under construction.

I'm sorry to share this news, but what we know as Downtown Miami today will soon disappear.

our photographers: Julie Torres, Dave Lawrence, William Benshimol, Michel Catalan, Julia Osorno, Marco Romano, Analia Castro, Rafael Guillen and melissa guerrero.

A photowalk is a curated space-time for a group of photographers to develop a photographic work in a determined time and area. It is free drawing but with technical, aesthetic, and conceptual orientation as required by the students. We do them in places you might never go or places that, because they are so obvious, you would not consider them either; in the end, it all depends on the edge with which we approach that momentum. Back at the school, we downloaded the photos and generated an enriching constructive criticism session, where all students participated, moderated by the instructor.

What you see here is part of the result of that process.