Tucson by 26 year-old American photographer J. Daniel Hud is a visual exploration of the city of Tucson, Arizona: “The project is a re-examination of my hometown. I was born in Tucson and lived there until I was 18. The sprawl and exceptional heat of Tucson make the sidewalk a space mostly untrodden. For most of the year nobody spends time or walks outside for leisure. Public transportation is inconvenient. The city from end to end is a grid of wide, slow-moving side streets. At age 24 I moved back to the city and began photographing to re-process it for myself. The work is a look at how the natural and man-made design of the public spaces of Tucson are made use of by the different classes of Tucsonans and how this affects their own lives, in public and otherwise.”

J. Daniel started taking pictures for Tucson without really thinking of it as a project: “In returning to the city I became aware of what interested me about Tucson and I started taking long, unplanned walks, mostly following my nose through town. To focus on the effect that Tucson as a city has on its citizens I used the image of Tucson developed from my childhood as a reference. I’d like people to see how public space is treated in the more auto-centric and warm-weathered cities by those who do and don’t need it.”

Films and documentaries have had a great influence on J. Daniel’s work as a photographer, in particular the films by the Maysles brothers (“They were very eye-opening to me when I was younger“). He was also influenced by Russian literature and the books by Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski. Some of J. Daniel’s favorite contemporary photographers are Lise Sarfati, Carolyn Drake, Paul D’Amato and Luc Delahaye. The last photobook he bought was An Act of Unspeakable Violence by Matthias Bruggmann, and the next he’d like to buy is Yerevan 1996/1997 by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg.

J. Daniel’s #threewordsforphotography are:
Evidence. Narrative. Resource.