Portfolios
Fine Art Photography by Paolo Salcido
"Soular Spririts In Broken Worlds" -Glass Abstracts
Series of fine art images of whole or broken glass, then lighted with colored filters and painted with liquid residuals..
Soular Spirits
Abstracts of glass with liquid residues paintings photographed with lights for limited edition fine art collections and assets..
A 10+ year Photographic narrative of "The Heart of San Francisco's Oldest Restaurants; (pre-pandemic)
Portraits of immigrant and American workers in the one of the oldest global industries from the oldest restaurants & cafes around the San Francisco; prepandemic and some survived postpandemic.
One day in March of 2014 I saw on TV local news of a man named Joe who was retiring. The story intrigued me and the light went on in my head, thinking of my father and the working friends and some hardships that went along with the food service industry. I learned how long Joe was in the food business and how San Francisco was saying goodbye to a food institution of long standing service. I was compelled to capture this event and many others as historic, socioeconomics, families and friendships. Hence, my 10+ year project, “The Heart of San Francisco’s Oldest Restaurants”; and now of the World.
Thus, my “Oldest Restaurants Globally” is worth continuing as it shows the human experience of camaraderie of people gathering to meet, share meals and exchange stories that all gets passed on to more generations who will pass the baton of meaningful help to each other when times are good and bad.
I’ve photographed the cornerstone restaurant industry—often the heartbeat of local, regional, national, and global economies, a living thermometer of livelihoods. I create cinematic images for a reason, my spirit and soul have been given the gift of seeing and discovering isolation in myself, other persons in themselves, in groups and I see isolation in still life subjects. I use silhouettes to express emotional distance in my portraits, while backlit painted glass in still life evokes a quiet, spectral presence. Yet from solitude, I often uncover the seeds of connection and service. Immigration can carry the weight of alienation—an echo of absence and a longing for belonging. I lean into finding a place that allows me to create an abstract image in our world when capturing images.
My photographic work explores the tension between permanence and impermanence—how memory, material, and gesture collide in moments of transformation. I’m interested in how images can both document and distort, serving as fragile archives of emotion where language often fails.
Each photograph begins with a question: what remains when context is stripped away? I work with analog and digital processes, often incorporating found imagery, layered textures, and spatial interventions to challenge the viewer’s assumptions about time, place, and narrative. I’m drawn to subjects that resist easy interpretation—abandoned spaces, obscured faces, transitional light—because they invite a slower kind of looking.
This practice is rooted in a desire to decelerate perception. In a culture of speed and saturation, I aim to create images that ask for pause, for reconsideration. Whether through scale, silence, or visual disruption, I want the viewer to feel slightly unmoored—invited to reorient themselves.
Ultimately, my work is less about answers than about framing uncertainty. It’s an ongoing attempt to hold complexity without resolution, using photography not as a mirror but as a threshold.
Are You Being Served?
Immigrants are part of what makes America, both in labor and their contributions to the entrepreneur spirit of America's culture. Innovation, education, intellectual property and ingenuity is America's best assets, along with it's generations of immigrants who wish to move up in society and start off in labor intensive jobs.
The World's Oldest Restaurants - the Old & the New
Can You See? The Wonders of Heaven and Earth
Images of windows and structures reveal something beyond beauty.
Can You See?
Fine Art photographs of Windows, Architecture, Landscapes, Mountains, Trees, beaches, Sunsets ,Looking, Searching, Finding
Digital Universe- AI & Surveillance -To Be Human
This is a look of how much has changed in our world over the last few decades & months. Since 1984 & the introduction of Apple computers, which has given the world personal computers and now others are showering us with AI products at people's digital fingertips. It's my view of abstract photography looking through pixelated images that depict the feeling of being under surveillance, possibly controlled & even disconnected from humanity. A new reality with jobs disappearing, economy changes, wealth shifting and much of society push to efficiency, convenience, progress, production, and who will have access or even more, who will be left behind in an already world of have nots.
Targets In A Digital Universe
Paris Rising - Yesterday or Today
Paris has some of the oldest restaurants in the world. See the workers, the clientele and the architectural interiors of the globe's oldest restaurants. The new can appear old in Paris.
Paris Rising
Immigrant workers in Paris restaurants as part of the labor force.
Waiter's Dream
Paris is know for their restaurants & cafes as well as their waiters and chefs.
Fine Art
Fine Art of Women -color/b&w
Asian woman in red dress
Asian Fine Art
B&W photographs of fine art Asian woman series
















































































































































































































