Photographer Johan Salvador, a robust man with thick forearms and deep-set brown eyes, glides across the rooftop of his Washington Heights apartment building, moving in and out of a squat to frame his subject: actor and musician Eric Smith, also known as Trance. With his Canon 5D, which Salvador calls the blessing of his life, secured around his right wrist, he directs Trance with one slender finger. Look that way. Walk forward. Crouch down.

It’s a Sunday afternoon and a warm, late-afternoon sun casts a resplendent light over the rooftop. In Salvador’s backdrop, the towers of the George Washington Bridge rise over the palisades across the Hudson. Salvador is decked out in tight gray pants, a gray and white plaid shirt, gray Converse sneakers, and dark aviators. Though he’s only 27, his neatly trimmed beard is flecked with gray.

He’s in his own state of mind. Salvador squints up at the sun, tests the light, tinkers with his camera. The act of photography, Salvador said, is liberating. “I completely forget I’m taking photos,” he said. “It’s automatic. It’s a piece of my mind.”

Salvador, though he comes from an uptown neighborhood usually ignored by New York’s art establishment, is climbing fast as a fashion photographer in the epicenter of the city’s fashion scene. His toehold on Seventh Avenue has given him a way to turn his eye on his own lively, underappreciated neighborhood.

When he moved to East Harlem from Villa Tapia, a village of about 3,000 in the northern Dominican Republic, he was already an artist, even as a precocious and rambunctious 13-year-old. Then, crayons were his tools. “I was always allowed to do whatever I wanted,” he said over coffee in Washington Heights recently, swirling his wrists before his face to demonstrate his tendency to draw on walls. “I was free.” Now, having spent his teenage years in uptown Manhattan—first in East Harlem, now in Washington Heights—Salvador experiences a different kind of freedom. A camera has replaced the crayons, and his lens allows him to take ownership of the streets he walks and the buildings he frequents. “Every time I take a photo, it’s a part of me,” Salvador said. “It’s unique and it’s mine.

Among New York’s photographers, Salvador is an anomaly: a Dominican living and working in a predominantly Dominican neighborhood that means a lot to him. “My Dominican community is here,” he said. “There’s people to relate to. It’s a wholesome experience. There’s a connection with a faraway place where I grew up.”

Johan Salvador: photo discussion from Joshua Tapper on Vimeo.

That Washington Heights is removed from the Manhattan bustle suits Salvador’s modest personality, said Erin Caruth Mugavero, public relations manager for Patterson J. Kincaid and LaROK, two labels for which Salvador has worked extensively. Salvador revels in the neighborhood’s historic pre-war architecture, expansive parks and relative quiet.

After graduating from the Art and Design High School in midtown Manhattan, Salvador studied commercial art and graphic design at New York City College of Technology before transferring to the now-defunct Katharine Gibbs School. Although he never graduated—his final year was 2004—he started exploring photography there.

His progress has been rapid, to say the least. He is largely self-taught, but after a series of classes at the School of Visual Arts and Photo Manhattan, a friend landed him a receptionist job at L’Koral Inc., a fashion house representing six labels, including Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen’s line Elizabeth and James. After taking on minor graphic design projects he began shooting for L’Koral’s in-house catalogue. Now, he said, his job is split “50-50” between in-house photography and serving as personal assistant to L’Koral president Jane Siskin.

As a freelancer, his reputation spread by word-of-mouth. Friends started recommending him, and before long he’d worked for such New York urban women’s wear labels as Edward Fong and Charley 5.0.

His light-hearted demeanor makes him easy to work with, said Susan DiMeo, vice president of sales and merchandise at Charley 5.0, a denim label that has hired Salvador to shoot four “look books” since spring 2008. “He’s so even-keeled,” she said. “He’s so cool, collected and funny, in a quiet way. He’s always climbing on things. I call him a ‘little monkey.’”

DiMeo calls Salvador’s aesthetic “urban with a Williamsburg kind of style.” His fashion photography ranges from stark, spartanly composed black and white images for Edward Fong, to breezy, luminescent color in a Hamptons series for Patterson J. Kincaid, part of L’Koral.

Salvador’s work is “innovative” because he’s always experimenting and discovering new locations, said Yalenis Cepeda, head designer at Charley 5.0. In his series of photos for Patterson J. Kincaid, for example, Salvador takes the viewer through a whimsical summer day by the sea, capturing two sun-kissed women in beachwear as they frolic through tall grass and barren sands.

“Johan has a lot of reverence for beauty and nature,” said Mugavero, who’s known Salvador for five years. “There is a purity and an innocence, a lack of pretension, in his photographs.”

In an industry saturated with photographers, it’s remarkable for someone with little formal training to land a secure job, said Chris Callis, a Brooklyn freelance fashion photographer for 35 years. Considering the industry’s competitiveness, Callis said, it’s difficult to predict if a photographer will make it. “Sometimes background can work for you,” said Callis, referring to Salvador’s ethnicity, but “it comes down to talent, personality, ambition and point of view of fashion.”

Salvador handles production in the bedroom of his fifth-floor walkup, a bright, austere space with a stunning view of the George Washington Bridge. Although fashion photography is his meal ticket and career path, at times he finds it inhibiting. “Fashion is too controlled sometimes,” he said. “I love getting lost with my camera.” Still, he’s learning to apply his artistic side to fashion photography.

“My vision is abstract and avant-garde,” he said. “It has nice angles, nice colors; it’s different.” Now he has to sell the avant-garde to prospective employers, he said. “I’m trying to make my work more commercial,” he said, “but still out there like Dave LaChappelle”—a surrealist fashion photographer and advertising director.

While Salvador’s ambitions lie mostly in the fashion world—his dream is to shoot for arty magazines like Paper, Numéro and, of course, Vogue—he keeps a host of local projects in mind. He wants to stage fashion shoots using Washington Heights’ architecture as a backdrop and to shoot portraits of everyday passersby. He’s considering a Harlem-centric photo documentary book in the style of the recently-deceased Roy DeCarava.

While he may turn out to be DeCarava’s artistic heir, Salvador knows he’s only at the beginning of his career. “I was focused before, but now I realize where I can go with photography,” he said. “I want it. I want to share my voice.”