Antonio Vargas, photographer in Puerto Vallarta

I grew up watching an image get built

My father was Carlos Vargas Altamirano (Ajalpan, Puebla, 1925 – Tlalnepantla, State of Mexico, 2019), a watercolour painter.

For the first twenty-four years of my life I watched him work. We would drive out to the countryside and to the villages near the city, and there I watched him do what I later understood is half the craft: look at a scene and find the angle. He would take photographs as reference, go back to the studio, build the sketch, resolve the watercolour, frame it. There was always art in our house, and that way of seeing is the one thing I can say with certainty that I inherited.

His work is documented in the Enciclopedia de México, in Seis siglos de historia gráfica de México, in the 1975, 1977 and 1981 volumes of Artistas plásticos de México, and in Who’s Who in Mexico 1989–1990. In July 1988 he presented “La magia Chamula” at the Palacio de Bellas Artes — Mexico’s national fine arts palace, in Mexico City — with forty original watercolours, becoming the first Mexican watercolourist to hold a solo exhibition in that building. The following year the city of Tehuacán named him a favourite son.

There is something in his life that ended up repeating itself in mine without my looking for it. Before he painted, my father was a salesman for Gillette, and he was good at it: he won the national award two years running. In 1965 he quit to devote himself entirely to watercolour, with six paintings finished over two years as his entire starting point.

Fifty-eight years later I made the same decision, except it took me considerably longer to get there. I did not plan it as a tribute, and I did not notice the parallel until long afterwards.

Six times in Puerto Vallarta

I arrived in 1992 to work at a beach club. I met my future wife here; we married the following year. Since then we have come and gone six times.

I came back in 1995 and again in 1997, both times to hospitality. In 1999 I returned as a freelance designer. In 2009 a hotel in the area brought me back again. And in 2023 I returned as a photographer.

Between those stays I lived in Los Cabos twice, in Cancún twice, in the Dominican Republic, in Melaque and in Querétaro — that last one the only exception, inland, in central Mexico’s Bajío region. Almost always in hospitality, almost always in beach destinations, and often producing promotional photography and video for the properties where I worked.

That is what I mean when I say I know this bay. It is not a line for a website. It means knowing what time the light works on each beach, which ones fill up in high season, which stay quiet on a Tuesday in December, and what to do when the sky closes over twenty minutes before your session.

2006, going digital

In 2006 I bought a Sony Alpha DSLR-A100 with an 18-70 and a 75-300. That was my entry into digital, and for the next seventeen years I photographed on nearly every day off and through a good share of the events at the hotels where I worked. I never charged for any of it. Thousands of photographs and hundreds of videos piled up.

Looking back, it was seventeen years of practice without the pressure of having to deliver anything to anyone. I did not plan it that way, but it is probably the best training I could have had.

2023, charging for this

I came back to Puerto Vallarta in 2023 and decided to work as a photographer full time. I put together a complete professional kit — camera, lenses, flashes, tripods, gimbal — and leaned on my brother-in-law Alonso Reyes, of Alonso Reyes Photography, who has been shooting professionally in this city longer than I have.

That accelerated everything. Learning new gear is a matter of hours. Learning to read the light of one specific destination — the half-past-five backlight in Conchas Chinas, the way water throws light back at you in Los Muertos, what the sunset does behind Punta de Mita — takes seasons. Having someone who already knew it saved me years.

We still work together when a session needs a second photographer or video, and I have worked alongside him at weddings in that same role, both here and in San Francisco, California.