About Me

Russ Aguilar is an environmental educator from Marin County, California. His career has taken him to work in 5 National Parks, 2 State Parks, 1 U.S. Fish & Wildlife Refuge, 2 public schools, and 1 Environmental Learning Center.

He is now the Community Programs Manager for Literacy for Environmental Justice, where he directs career development and environmental education programs in the Southeast portion of San Francisco.

A photographer for 20 years, he photographs small animals in their habitat, whether it be a natural or manmade space that creature has chosen to call home.

Each creature was photographed alive, unmolested, and with great love and care.

Cumaica Coffee, 1398 Mission Street, San Francisco, California

Ingleside Gallery, 1507 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, California

Dark Horse Inn, 942 Geneva Avenue, San Francisco, California

Hyperrealism and Impressionism Collide in Tiny Subjects of our Urban Ecoregion

My name is Russ Aguilar, and I am a queer, Latino Bay Area native who finds inspiration in our smallest neighbors: tiny invertebrates coexisting in landscapes that have been changed and carved by human hands.

Bathed in light and color, a larger than life subject appears in sharp focus against a blurred backdrop. Abstract shapes invite the audience into wonder, bringing heightened awareness of the interplay of sensations, repulsion and attraction. Aversion is replaced with amazement, the frights or wounds invertebrates have given us are forgiven. A world--soft and sharp, familiar and foreign, ordinary yet original, is revealed.

As human systems have undergone rapid transformation — the Indigenous decimated, ranchos, Missions, gold, grids, skylines — so too have the natural systems on which we rely: Waters bottled in reservoirs, migration corridors turned to interstates, greenery, once uninterrupted, restricted to parks.

Amidst these larger tumults, we see the distinct life stages each species goes through, and so must we all recreate ourselves to survive in a place as dynamic as this. My art asks the viewer not to rush through either these stages or spaces in our physical geography, but to stop and look closer.

As technology dominates more of our time, as our children grow less connected to nature, or even afraid of it, my art reminds the viewer that nature is inescapably surrounding us, and asks us to reevaluate the boundaries between manmade and “natural” spaces. The forces around us are too great to withstand this false dichotomy.

Using a diffuse flash and a light editing hand, the images richly evoke the colors and freeze the activity of tiny animals, inspiring a wonder about what life at small scale must be like. Macro techniques create visuals that are impossible to the human eye, pushing past the boundaries of ordinary nature photography into the world of hyperrealism. The work does not seek to transport you to a far-off wilderness, but instead forces you into the wilderness right before us--but in a way we can never quite see nor feel.

Through images, I seek to create conversation with other forms of art that galvanize and touch me. Street photography, candids, and anthropological photographic works reveal to us the patterns of humanity and the glories of the mundane. My subjects are all photographed in the wild and with minimal disturbance from the artist, grounded in realia.

My work interrogates modern photography by exchanging action for stillness, replacing grayscale with vivid color, rejecting great subjects for the most tiny, supplanting the man-made and new with the living, primeval, and ancient. I have no interest in drones; I shoot knelt, prostrate, in subjection and sway of the small.

I consider this outsider art; I have had no formal training in photography nor art, and though I benefit deeply from a liberal arts education, I am an environmental educator by trade. It is my wish that my art returns you to the childish awe you had encountering tiny wildlife when you, too, were small.

My name is Russ Aguilar, and I am a queer Latino Bay Area native who finds inspiration in our smallest neighbors: tiny invertebrates coexisting in landscapes that have been changed and carved by human hands.

Bathed in light and color, a larger than life subject appears in sharp focus against a blurred backdrop. Abstract shapes invite the audience into wonder, bringing heightened awareness of the interplay of sensations, repulsion and attraction. Aversion is replaced with amazement, the frights or wounds invertebrates have given us are forgiven. A world--soft and sharp, familiar and foreign, ordinary yet original, is revealed.

As human systems have undergone rapid transformation — the Indigenous decimated, ranchos, Missions, gold, grids, skylines — so too have the natural systems on which we rely: Waters bottled in reservoirs, migration corridors turned to interstates, greenery, once uninterrupted, restricted to parks.

Amidst these larger tumults, we see the distinct life stages each species goes through, and so must we all recreate ourselves to survive in a place as dynamic as this. My art asks the viewer not to rush through either these stages or spaces in our physical geography, but to stop and look closer-into ourselves, our worlds.

Technology dominates more of our time; our children grow less connected to nature, or even afraid of it; my art reminds the viewer that nature is inescapably surrounding us, and asks us to reevaluate the boundaries between manmade and “natural” spaces. The forces around us are too great to withstand this false dichotomy.

Using a diffuse flash and a light editing hand, the images richly evoke the colors and freeze the activity of tiny animals, inspiring a wonder about what life at small scale must be like. Macro techniques create visuals that are impossible to the human eye, pushing past the boundaries of traditional nature photography into the world of hyperrealism. The work does not seek to transport you to a far-off wilderness, but instead forces you into the wilderness right before us--but in a way we can never quite see nor feel.

Through images, I seek to create conversation with other forms of art that galvanize and touch me. Street photography, candids, and anthropological photographic works reveal to us the patterns of humanity and the glories of the mundane. My subjects are all photographed in the wild and with minimal disturbance from the artist, grounded in realia.

My work interrogates modern photography by exchanging action for stillness, replacing grayscale with vivid color, rejecting great subjects for the most tiny, supplanting the man-made and new with the living, primeval, and ancient. I have no interest in drones; I shoot knelt, prostrate, in subjection and sway of the small.

I consider this outsider art; I have had no formal training in photography nor art, and though I benefit deeply from a liberal arts education, I am an environmental educator by trade. It is my wish that my art returns you to the childish awe you had encountering tiny wildlife when you, too, were little.