In a tent behind red curtains, unattended and buzzed Miami socialites pose for the camera of 22-year-old photographer and physical media romantic Nain Cruz, the inventor of “Photo Tent.”
Cruz trades control of the shot and sits back to edit, print, and cut the four portraits that cost $5. Each photo is printed onto luster paper, chosen by Cruz for its durability and its balance between matte and gloss finishes.
The job requires constant adjustments as the position of the sun affects the lighting, yet he says he wouldn’t want it any other way. The portraits, he believes, are for eternity.
“I think there’s something about a physical card that just you can’t help but shed a tear,” says Cruz.
A century after the arrival of the first analog photo booth in New York in the 1920s, Cruz’s Photo Tent allows friends to capture their gleeful night out in ways a digital camera or a smartphone doesn’t.
Photo Tent was made to fit anywhere, Cruz says, and together with his friend, he’s now set up shop at over a dozen venues, from chill coffee shops to night clubs in Downtown. It is held monthly at Lot 11 Skate Park under I-95, where the cultural art and entertainment market Let’s Get Together takes place and where the photo station made its debut in August 2024.
Cruz joined the Miami Arts Charter School in Homestead Florida at 11 years old to study photography. At lunchtime, Cruz would eat in the classroom of his adored photography teacher. In 8th grade, Cruz and his best friends created Project Foreword, a magazine that featured stories of artists. The 2 year project led the teenagers to photograph musicians and fellow photographers all-around Miami and even reached the shops of Chinatown in New York for an issue.
Four years later , Cruz envisioned his Photo Tent while flipping through Andy Warhol’s photobooth series of the 1960s. He fell in love with the black and white strips, an early exploration of Warhol’s photography featuring self-portraits, friends, and artists of New York.
Reminiscent of Warhol’s playful series , Cruz’s tent has developed a surreal scene of a large hand shadow in pursuit of snatching a guy as he poses in the booth. The victim and the hand are Cruz’s friends while they experiment with a flashlight and aim towards creating something “weird”. The tent has also brought Cruz to tears as it has captured his friends holding a sonogram and celebrating the news of parenthood.
Miami’s vibrant city and nightlife are the stars of the Photo Tent and Cruz is not yet ready to share that with other cities.
“I think part of me likes the idea of keeping it exclusive to here,” says Cruz. “There’s so many nooks and crannies of Miami that I don’t know if I’ll get tired of it.”
Loyal to the Magic City he also dreams of occupying the sidewalk of South Beach one day for a photo tent session. But first, he needs to figure out how to run it smoothly – without access to electricity.
In the tent, everything the camera lens sees is projected onto Cruz’s laptop screen allowing him to ensure everything looks great. He clicks away but his pleasure for perceiving the initial reaction of a first-timer drives him to peek occasionally. Wait times range from 15 to 40 minutes depending on order volume and the type of event. That patrons are willing to wait this long is heartening, Cruz says “I don’t even think I would wait twenty minutes for a picture,” Cruz confesses, adding that he hopes to reduce the wait time to 10 minutes.
While he originally thought he would only be working the tent for a few months, by the fourth time he did it, he was hooked. Led by curiosity and pure enjoyment, he has committed to continuing this project alongside his role as director of photography at a wellness studio, his primary source of income.
When Cruz looks back at his expanding collection of Photo Tent strips, he gets emotional on how life has changed, including his own. He has captured moments with friends he lost touch with and new ones that grew closer. The pictures, he says, “will outlive Photo Tent, outlive me.”
