The photographs show the legacy of Latinx photography in the United States

Elizabeth Ferrer is vice president of contemporary art at BRIC Arts Media, a non-profit Brooklyn organization. He is also the author of the author Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History. Ferrer’s family is Mexican, and he was born and raised in Los Angeles. He loved art as a child, and began to grow Chicano civil rights movement, he saw firsthand how life shaped art. “One thing I saw when I was in primary school was the murals that were going up in the neighborhood. As a child I didn’t have much access to museums, but I certainly saw it and saw the way art can be used for social and community change. ”

This idea of ​​art for social change led him through school as a young curator and champion of Mexican and Latin American art. Finding Latinx photographers who were not known as young women created a platform for her and the artists for themselves.

How did you become interested in photography?

In high school I got excited about photography and started taking a lot of pictures. I went to Wellesley for art history and then to Columbia. When I was studying art history, there was very little in the way of Latinx art, Chicanx art, or Mexican art, so I was very curious. When I moved to New York and started working with contemporary art, my artistic interest was sparked and I started traveling to Mexico City. There I started to get to know the artist and in the 1990s I started organizing some exhibitions about Mexican art and photography for places in the US. I love photos of Mexico, and I still do, but I began to realize that Latinx photographers were closer to home doing important work. I started working with an organization called En Foco in New Fork, created in the 1970s by a group of Nuyorican photographers. Through En Foco I met many Latinx photographers in the United States who were generally being left out of media discourses. Their work is largely excluded from museum collections, as they were not seen in major American photography surveys or in photo galleries. There was very little visibility for those photographers. I decided to work on this book to address this gap in the way we understand the history of American photography.

What did you highlight about your work with Mexican photography?

I went to Mexico as a young curator, thinking that I would get an exhibition of contemporary Mexican artists to be seen in the United States. I was pretty green. I didn’t know people, but I started going to galleries. There was a gallery with a solo exhibition of the author’s photographs Lorea Garduño, and he was this young and innovative traditional photographer, XX. century was very strong in Mexico in the school of black and white photography. It is very poetic. I was shocked by his photos and bought a photo of the show.

Did you feel that museums or galleries in the United States had to fight to recognize this work?

Early in my career, I was fortunate that there was a great deal of interest in Mexican art in the United States. The Columbus Quincentennial took place in 1992; I also participated in a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, where I was the editor of the catalog for a blockbuster exhibition. Latin American art of the century. Basically all museums wanted a show of Mexican art or Latin American art. I was lucky, it was the right place at the right time and I was able to do a lot of exhibitions and projects. But there was much less interest in Latinx art and photography at the time; which took a long time. . The interest was not so great, which took a long time. There is no doubt that in recent years there has been a growing interest in African American art and, to some extent, in Latinx art as well. People are starting to realize this gap between what they know and what they don’t know, and there is a thirst for Latinx to know all things.

En Foco was created in 1974 by a group of Puerto Rican photographers who experienced these problems with visibility. They were knocking on doors but not receiving the tasks of the mainstream media. And they certainly didn’t get their work done in museums, but they did see white photographers. A great case is Bruce Davidson, his book East 100th Street, It was published that he was documenting a poor block in Harlem at the same time as there were African-American photographers covering this community. The same thing happened in East Los Angeles, where I grew up. During the civil rights era of the 1960s, there were numerous protests and demonstrations, along with a push for ethnic pride and greater political awareness among Latinos. And you know, magazines covered a lot of those demonstrations, but Magnum photographers sent them to those neighborhoods. Local photographers who were photographing these communities day in and day out also covered these things, but their work was not seen nationally.

When I participated in En Focon in the 1990s, they were very active and organized exhibitions, awarded scholarships to photographers for new work, publishing New light magazine. As important as En Foco is, it’s still not common. Achieving this major coverage is still a big challenge. I hope my book helps give these photographers a lot of exposure, but it’s just the beginning.

Many of these photographers in the book would have to write a monograph about them, they would have to do solo exhibitions. Many of these photographers are quite successful, but with a lot of glamor that has been linked to Latin American art and adapted by major organizations like MoMA, that hasn’t happened to Latinx photographers.

There are so many organizations out there today that connect the most common media with lesser-known photographers, Diversify Photo and Indigen Photo come to mind. Do you see a difference in recent years?

I think a lot has changed, as we have gone from emphasizing print to digital. That has been a tremendous change. In print, there was always a porter. There were smaller publications New light, but that can never compete with bright major publications.

When the digital space opened up, with the proliferation of online news sites and blogs, for example, an indigenous rights organization was likely to hire an indigenous photographer who lives in that community or has a long-term residence. that community. Of course, another huge change is the rise of social media, so many photographers, even older ones, have Instagram feeds and can use them as a platform without porters, without filters, to present their work.

One thing that always worries me about the visibility of these photographers is the photography market. There are several Mexican photographers Manuel Alvarez Bravo or Graciela Iturbide, who have a strong market, whose works you see in commercial galleries. But Latinx photographers are largely out of commercial galleries, there are only a few. Especially for photographers who were born in the 1980s and 1990s, that was not part of their experience. They could know how to teach life or get help, but not by selling their work. Gallery is an important thing, because a good gallery owner will be the person who will help you get to the museum shows, who will help you place the work in permanent collections. Excluding Latinx work from galleries and these aspects of commercial photography prevents long-term ability to have a permanent presence in the work. When artists die, what happens to those works? What happens if this work is not appreciated from a commercial point of view?

Returning to what Latinx photographers have said about putting the lens behind the social problems of the day. What do you think is the role that Latinx photographers play in covering these ongoing political issues today?

It’s a limit, but it’s also a situation for Puerto Ricans. They are issues of migration and equity. The book includes photographs that some photographers were putting at the service of farm workers who were pushing for unionization in California in the 1960s. or someone like Hiram Maristany of New York, who was a Young Lords photographer, an entrepreneurial group in Puerto Rico. But it seems to me that all of these photographers, even the most recent generations working with more conscious artistic or conceptual perspectives, still maintain this political stance, a desire to reflect their community. I would mention Harry Gamboa and his main series in particular Untied Chicano man. This series began when police announced that they were looking for a Chicano male police officer. This stereotype as a criminal of a young Mexican American, in the same way that young African American men are demonized, sparked for him to create this large series of portraits of Chicano men of different ages and professions, standing in the frame. . Some of them are actors, lawyers, dancers, judges, priests, and he deliberately took pictures at dusk, sometimes looking at the camera aggressively or assertively, forcing you to confront your stereotypes.

What do you want readers to understand about the importance of seeing U.S. visual history through the Latinx lens?

This book brings together more than 80 photographers from the 19th century. It tells the story of the century. It’s important for people to see that we were not only part of that history, but that we were innovating within that history. For example, there are many Latinx photographers working in the 1980s and 1990s. The work of this is very appropriate to know how photographers use digital tools today. I want people to see and get to know individual photographers and appreciate their work. I thought it was important to write a book for Latinx photographers because they were very invisible, but in the end they have to be seen like these Latinx photographers American photographers. They are part of the history of American art, of American photography. I don’t think the whole history of photography has been written, there are a lot of things that are left out.

In order to write a richer and more vivid history of American photography, it needs to have more Latino photographers, African American photographers, Asian American photographers, and more Queer photographers. This history so far has been too narrow in its definition.