Antonio Lopez kept a camera within reach of the drawing table. Throughout the 1970s, the fashion illustrator who defined an era’s silhouette also made a parallel record in Instamatic film: friends, models, and passing visitors to his studio, photographed quickly and without ceremony. Those pictures form the basis of *Instamatics*, published by Twin Palms Publishers in December 2011. The 160-page hardcover gathers the most innovative of this material, most of it previously unpublished, across 85 four-color plates. An essay by Philippe Garner and an interview by Michael McKenzie frame the work.
The photographs are not snapshots in the casual sense. Lopez treated each sitting as raw material, elaborating each into a sequence and then exploring the fantasy latent in each series; he assembled the results into photo albums. That method is visible in the book’s organization, which reads both as a visual diary and as an artist’s working notebook. The people who came through the studio are recorded, and the sequences show how Lopez worked from them. The publisher calls the result a chronicle of an era.
Twin Palms issued the book in a large format, 11 by 14 inches, appropriate to the scale of the sequences. The subjects — portraiture, instant photography, and the nude — place the volume within a recognizable photographic tradition, but its primary interest lies elsewhere: in watching a draftsman think photographically. Lopez is known chiefly for his drawings; this body of work shows a second discipline running alongside them. For collectors attentive to the overlap between fashion, illustration, and photography in the 1970s, the book documents a practice that is difficult to reconstruct from the finished drawings alone.
The publisher’s listing now describes the edition as out of print. The case for the book does not rest on scarcity but on what it contains: a sustained, sequenced photographic project by an artist whose camera work has remained largely unseen. It rewards close looking at the level of the individual frame and at the level of the album.
