Studio369 is a post-documentary art practice that translates lived experience into material form.
It operates as the translation layer of the work: framework-driven, materially grounded, and built for institutional contexts.
The practice evolved from documentary photography into material transformation—moving from photographs as endpoints to photographs as raw material. Images migrate across substrates. Materials carry stress. Objects retain record.
Harvey Castro
Harvey Castro is a documentary photographer and artist whose work documents communities navigating environmental catastrophe, displacement, and economic invisibility.
His practice draws on two decades of operations and supply chain experience, bringing systems-level analysis to documentary observation. This background shapes how he sees structural patterns in crisis, migration, and adaptation.
Castro’s long-term projects include documentation in Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and across climate-impacted regions of the Americas. His work has been recognized by CENTER Santa Fe, Belfast Photo Festival, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Creative Corps Fellowship.
In 2022, during a residency at Casa Lu in Antigua, Guatemala, Castro began translating documentary images into material objects—cyanotypes, textile transfers, and installations. This marked a shift from photography as endpoint to photography as raw material.
Castro is bilingual (English/Spanish) and based in Oakland, California.
Images migrate across substrates. Materials carry stress. Objects retain record.
Studio369
Studio369 is the translation layer of Castro’s post-documentary practice. It transforms photographic documentation into material artifacts—installations, textile works, and editioned objects.
Rather than preserving images as fixed representations, Studio369 treats materials as active carriers of historical memory. Images migrate across substrates. Materials carry stress. Objects retain record.
The practice is governed by the RAID Framework—Resilience, Adaptation, Impermanence, Detachment—a methodology for translating lived experience into material form.
Castro’s installations extend beyond photographic representation into sensory experience, using alternative processes including cyanotype, dye sublimation, and grana cochinilla (cochineal dye)—creating layers of historical reclamation and material storytelling.
Exhibitions and Presentations
His work has been exhibited internationally and presented in institutional and exhibition contexts, including KOIK Contemporary and the Harvey Milk Photo Center. These installations position documentary images within physical space, allowing viewers to encounter them as structural and environmental conditions rather than isolated visual records.
Studio369 serves as the institutional, archival, and commercial platform for Castro’s material practice, operating as an exhibition surface, artifact registry, and framework for the preservation and presentation of installation-based and object-based work.