Jesse Lee Vargas-Colucci

Jesse Lee Vargas is a photographer who has spent the past 10 years photographing immigrant communities in California. After 15 years, she returned back to Buffalo in pursuit of exploring the beauty and struggles of Buffalo’s working class, artists, entrepreneurs, activists and business owners that form the specific community of Allen Town, on Buffalo’s West Side. Jesse is motivated by the uncertainty and transitory qualities that make up this tightly woven, and perhaps unraveling, last bastion of Buffalonian Bohemia. She will be utilizing a social documentarian aesthetic with portraits and conducting interviews in order to tell a story about the intense and dynamic time of being Buffalonian.