Photographer’s Notebook on location Ybor

“The most fascinating places to photograph don’t have signposts leading to them. They are the places that everyone overlooks or deems unimportant and boring. A great photographer proves them wrong.” —Henry Carroll

Where to shoot is one of the most important questions a photographer will ever ask themselves. And it’s a question we repeatedly ask as we search for new visual experiences close to home. Sometimes the place is the subject, and sometimes the place is just the background. Either way, it’s important, for some places inspire and some places don’t.

Perhaps this is why I was most drawn to the Location chapter of Henry Carroll’s Read This if You want to Take Great Photographs of Places. The rest of the book is informative enough — it could help even the absolute novice start taking decent photographs of places within a day. But I’m not a novice, so it’s a little harder to get my attention. When I’m reading a photography book, I’m always looking for that unique little tidbit that inspires me to re-think my approach or try something new. For me, those little tidbits were all clustered in the Location chapter. It begins with a simple command, “Find your place.”

This month, my place was in the repurposed historic buildings of Ybor City. After reading Carroll’s book, I asked myself why. Why was I so drawn to photograph these old buildings? I had no personal connection to them. My great granddaddy didn’t emigrate from Cuba to work in the cigar factories of Ybor City in the late 1800’s. Nope. I moved to Florida from Michigan with my parents when I was five years old. I remember them taking me to Ybor City during the day once. I think we saw someone hand roll a cigar, but I’m not sure. By the time the 1980s came along, there weren’t many cigar factories left.

Carroll writes of photographers being drawn to sublime landscapes, iconic places and sometimes even the suburbs. So what kind of place is Ybor? It would be easy to call it historic, but Ybor is much more than that. Ybor is always changing — it’s an evolving place.

Peer into Swope Rodante’s law office on 5th Avenue, and you can see the remnants of Florida’s first brewery — The Florida Brewing Company. For 65 years, the brewery was a total success. It survived prohibition and the Great Depression. Then Anheuser-Busch and Schlitz came to town, and The Florida Brewing Company was gone, just like that. Nothing lasts forever.

From about 1975 to 1999, the old building was abandoned. The tower and the roof collapsed. Then attorney Dale Swope and contractor Joseph Kokolakis purchased the building and converted it into office space. It doesn’t look like office space at all — not the part of the building I saw, anyway. It’s glorious past shines beyond its present use like a badge of honor. Look closely, and you will see that the door to the old fermentation room is still there.

As I write this, Ybor’s only remaining wooden frame cigar factory is being converted into luxury apartments. And while I imagine the old home of Swann Cigars was beautiful and full of character, so are these new apartments. The developer is keeping the old wooden floors and the old Swann sign. They are even trying to match some of the original interior paint colors. The buildings storied past will likely be its biggest selling point.

The Ybor Cigar Factory building complex, once the home of Vicente Ybor's original cigar factory, is now home to the Church of Scientology and Creative Loafing Tampa. That's right — many of our articles are written and edited on the site where Ybor City's cigar industry was founded back in 1886. 

Like these buildings, I have changed. I was once a scientist. When I think about that time, it is like peering through the looking glass. I see a completely different person living a completely different life. And though I feel far removed from it today, it was once my life. And it suited me…then. For a time, nothing was more comfortable or routine than slipping on a lab coat and a pair of gloves each morning. It had become such a part of my identity that when I got too sick to continue, it felt like my insides had been gutted. Like some of these old buildings, I had fallen into disrepair. And I remained in that state for years — about five years to be exact.

Then I started to search for a new purpose. But five years had passed, and I had changed. Now I was disabled. Whatever I chose to do next wouldn’t be easy. Every day would be a fight. It was no longer a question of what I’d like to do for a living. It was a question of what I could love so much that I would be willing to fight for it every day for the rest of my life.

Finding that special thing you are willing to fight for is a real game changer. Nothing is ever the same afterwards. It thrusts you into a new reality where your work ceases to be work at all. But you never really forget the way things were before. Your body and your soul are marked — they are marked with the successes of your past, the pain of loss, and the love of discovering something new. And if you look closely at these old buildings, you can see it all. Now they are office spaces and apartment buildings, and that’s great. But think of what they used to be.