Platica: Chicano Camera Culture – An Intergenerational Conversation

Martina Lopez earned her BFA in Photography from the University of Washington in Seattle and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been working with portraiture, landscape, and digital technology since 1985; her practice explores the believability of the photograph and the malleability of the digital medium. Her work has been widely published in influential photographic books, including A Short Course in Photography: Digital by Barbara London and Jim Stone, Naomi Rosenblum’s A World History of Photography, as well as The Digital Eye by Sylvia Wolf. Lopez has exhibited widely, including at the International Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, NM, and the Seoul Museum of Art in Seoul, Korea. In addition, she has participated in multiple traveling exhibitions organized by the Aperture Foundation, the George Eastman House, and others. Her work is held in major public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has received several photography fellowships and is Head of the Photography Department at the University of Notre Dame, where she has taught since 1993.

William Camargo @billythecamera is a lens-based artist and educator raised in Anaheim, California. He is a lecturer in photography at Pasadena City College and Cal State Fullerton. His work focuses on gentrification, police violence, and Chicanx/Latinx histories and comments on the hegemonic history of photography through archival research and performative interventions that live as photographs. William has held residencies at the Latinx Project at NYU, Light Work in Syracuse, NY, TILT Institute in Philadelphia, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Penumbra Foundation in NYC, Aurora Photo Center in Indianapolis, and Satisfactory Casa in San Jose, Costa Rica. William’s works are in several public and private collections, including S.F MOMA Library, Huntington Library, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Harvard Library, MSU Broad Art Museum, LACMA, and the J Paul Getty Museum.

Robert C. Buitrón @robertcbuitron is a photographer, writer, and curator. His photographs have been included in many national and international exhibitions, such as at Seattle Art Museum, International Center of Photography, Denver Art Museum, Camerawork (London), Sala de Exposiciones del Canal Isabel II (Madrid), and Museo Nacional de Arte (Mexico City), as well many other group and solo exhibitions. Grants and awards include a Visual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1984 Olympics Photographic Commission Project, Art Matters Foundation, and a Visual Artist Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. His photographs are included in the permanent collections of Bibliothèque Nationale, Center for Creative Photography, Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía, Museo Nacional de Arte/Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and New Orleans Museum of Art.

Robert is a founding member of Movimiento Artístico del Río Salado (MARS), Inc., an artist-run art organization in Phoenix, Arizona, established in 1978 and dedicated to advancing the artwork of Chicana/o and Native American artists.

Jesús Manuel Mena Garza is a photographer, artist, and cultural organizer whose work reflects his migrant farmworker heritage and engagement with the Chicano civil rights movement. He studied Journalism at San José State University with an emphasis on Photojournalism, where he became involved in Chicano student activism and media collectives. He then went on to work for Chicano film, theater, and radio organizations. Garza served as a consultant for the San José Museum of Art’s first exhibition on Chicano Art in1974. He has shown his photographs at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France; and for the proposed National Museum of the American Latino, Washington, DC. Along with exhibitions, his work has been widely published and serves as a resource for researchers, educators, and cultural institutions.

Working with distinct approaches to the photographic medium, Christina Fernandez has examined such themes as migration, labor, urban space, and personal history. Her projects weave family narratives with social and spatial dynamics, cementing her role in shaping contemporary Chicana/o/x image making. Her survey Multiple Exposures, organized by the California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside, traveled nationally. She is a graduate of UCLA and the California Institute of the Arts.