Joseph Michael Lopez (JML) (b. 1973) is an independent photographer born in New York City to a Puerto Rican father and a mother who left Cuba in 1967. He earned his MFA from Columbia University in 2011. Lopez began his career as an analog cinematographer on Bruce Weber’s critically acclaimed film Chop Suey (2001). He currently divides his time between long-form projects, teaching, and commercial work. His photographs have appeared on the covers and pages of M, The Magazine for Leica M Photography, Leica Fotografie International, The New York Times Magazine, The Sunday Review of The New York Times, New York Magazine, and The New Yorker, among others.

Lopez’s work has been exhibited in Cuban Photography after 1980: Selections from the Museum’s Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2016, a commissioned series of his photographs of New York neighbourhoods, New York at Its Core: Future City Lab, was installed at the Museum of the City of New York. Photographs from JML NYC, the series from which this commission originated, have also been published in Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, as well as in the Leica M Book, a tribute to the camera’s first 70 years. Lopez’s first monograph, JML NYC 02–23, was published by GOST in fall 2024.