Marco Argüello is a Texas-based photographer who, after moving to Miami, immediately felt fascinated by the “eccentric sun worshippers” of South Beach. Ultraviolet is a photographic project that captures the bizarre and extravagant poses of bathers, often extrapolated from the crowd. As the title of the work shows, Argüello uses sunlight, which almost attacks the characters in his images, to paradoxically highlight the immense solitude of those who populate these immense beaches.

All the images were taken with a film camera, trying to decontextualize and isolate the plastic power of each character, which is almost a statue. It is no coincidence that these sun addicts are grotesque: all this is part of the stylistic choice of the artist, which brings out the overall surrealism of the images, especially in the shots in which groups of bathers are the protagonists.

You want to look away yet you can’t stop staring.

The result is a series of highly voyeuristic images, which forces us to look without feeling “guilty”.