Contemporary fine art photographer Cara Romero is thoughtful and deliberate in her work and particularly in her selection of photographs for her solo exhibition this month at the Museum of Photographic Arts at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park.
“The Artist Speaks: Cara Romero” is divided into three sections: Native California, Imagining Indigenous Futures, and Native Woman, and there’s a clear purpose to offer representations of her culture, history, and lived experience from her perspective as a Native American woman.
“Most of my work is identity work with contemporary Native peoples and issues…It’s really important for us to tell our own story. I think that’s the biggest thing,” says Romero, who’s a member of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe and was raised between their reservation in the Mojave Desert and Houston, Texas. “I’m just one person, I need hundreds of other Native people telling all kinds of different stories to show how dynamic and how diverse our race of people is, and that’s something that interests me a great deal, but I think it’s so important for us to tell our own stories.”
The exhibition at MOPA@SDMA opens April 27 and is on display through Oct. 20. She’s also the keynote lecturer at the Medium Festival of Photography on April 26 where she’ll discuss a bit about Indigenous California history and the production and creative process behind her staged, large-scale, theatrical photographs. She took some time to talk about her showing, the history of erasure in representation of Native peoples through ethnographic photography, and her love of futurism and incorporating it into her work. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: Your website talks about your path to photography beginning with frustration in your study of cultural anthropology as a student at the University of Houston, specifically portrayals of Native American people as solely historical. Can you talk about some of the thoughts/feelings that came up for you, and how that compelled you to begin telling visual stories through photography?
A: I know that all of us have at least a very brief teaching in school. Often in California, it starts with the fourth-grade mission project [a routine, but not mandatory, assignment given to thousands of children each year until new curriculum was adopted by the state in 2016], but if you pay really close attention to what you learn about Indigenous peoples, you’ll even see past-tense verbs being used: “The Native Americans made baskets, they utilized certain tools and objects.” It’s not that “they are making baskets,” in present-tense, so I think that it does a lot, psychologically, to reinforce that things are in the past. The ethnographic photographers from the turn of the century were White males looking in on culture and really documenting what they described as “a vanishing race.” The photographs of our ancestors were so beautiful that they really captured the imagination of people worldwide, not just here in America. Edward Curtis photographs, Frank Rinehart photographs, all of those sepia-toned tintypes and daguerrotypes of Native peoples, that was really where time kind of stopped for us as far as representation. Then, when we did show up, it was often problematic in media. It would often be stereotypical caricatures—whether it was in “Looney Tunes” or it was racist mascots and people dres in redface at football games—and all of this really gets into the psychology of young, Native people that are in our public schools, that are in urban areas, that are living out an ongoing history on reservations across the United States. There’s just this deep amount of erasure and absence, and I am just so in love with my community, I see so much beauty I grew up with, so much resilience with so much lived experience that is just so different from so many of the stereotypes that I saw growing up, that it was a ion of mine to want to tell real-life stories.
Q: In a 2019 interview with New Mexico Magazine, you mentioned a desire to get outside of “the exploitative white-male lens that had dominated Native American photography for over a hundred years.” What are some of the typical elements that show up in these kinds of photographs, and how have you approached creating art that achieves the opposite?
A: I would say some of the things that define that era are the use of black-and-white film. That was really what was available at the time, but when we think of black-and-white, sepia-toned photographs, it also psychologically tells us that that’s really old, that it’s from a time before color film was invented, so it kind of seals it into this vintage look.
One of the other things is that the photographs from the turn of the century are often devoid of any modern context. They’re not riding bicycles, they’re not driving cars, they’re not in the classroom, they’re not putting dinner on the table — all of the things that we do as human beings, so I think that there’s something else really calculated about making the American Indian mythic and majestic and stoic. I think when I first started out on black-and-white film at [the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a tribal arts college], really trying to figure things out, I was emulating some of those photographs. Saying to some of my friends and family, “OK, let’s put on our regalia and let’s go out in the landscape and we’ll make these photographs.” And they’re very beautiful photographs from early in my career, but they’re really a lot to unpack for a then 21-year-old young woman that was like, “What’s going on here? Why am I making photography that’s kind of funny because we don’t even do that?” In real life, we don’t put on our regalia and go stand in the middle of nowhere. I think that experience, combined with understanding that National Geographic was often exploitative of world cultures, gave me a reckoning early on of, “How do I work within this medium to give back to community?” So, that is at the main part of my work—am I telling good stories? Am I telling stories that are appropriate? Am I telling stories that we want other people to know, but that we also want to see ourselves reflected in? So, that question of, “Is this giving back?”
Technically, as I became more advanced, I understood that I have a great strength for color work. There is that very quick psychological switch that these bright, real-life colors that show up in my work—that shows skin tone, that shows time of day, that shows intense detail—the viewer understands that these are contemporary peoples right away. I think that those were some major shifts. And, I think, sense of humor. When we’re from marginalized communities, our sense of humor is medicine, it’s how we feel and it’s how we identify with each other, whether it be humor, slang, things that are true in our community that might not be true anywhere else. There’s a lot of sense of humor in my photography where I really consider my primary audience is other Native people first, and then through that truth and audience and conversation, I feel like everybody benefits from seeing the truth.
Q: The Native Arts & Cultures Foundation talked about your “well-rounded and proficient understanding of contemporary Native American photography.” How would you define contemporary Native American photography, for you? What are some of the markers that you think apply to it, and what do you need to include in your own work to feel like you’ve hit the mark?
A: For me, I think that we are defining ourselves as Native American artists and Native American photographers. I think every artist who’s been categorized really has to reckon with that categorization. For me, it’s contemporary Native art when it’s speaking to content or issues that directly affect our community or communities. That kind of goes back to the idea of, “Is it giving back to our communities?” When I say, “giving back,” is it of service? I would even go that far. Like, is this photograph of service? Is it empowering the woman and her family? Is it telling a story that might open people’s minds about who we are and all of the things that we can be? Those kinds of questions. For other Native people, it is not a monolithic culture and I think that is something that we face, as Native people or any people of color making artwork. All of a sudden, you represent all Native people, or all people from your community. That’s a heavy burden. I think all of our identities within Native America are valid. We have doctors, we have lawyers, we have people that have never lived on the reservation, we have mixed race Natives, we have super traditional full-blooded Natives—all of those stories manifest in thousands of different ways. I think, with each Native photographer, the main difference is that we’re telling stories from within our own experience and within our own cultures, and those can look a variety of different ways. Those can be landscapes from the places that we’re indigenous to, those can be documentary portrait work, those can be more staged and theatrical pieces, they can be anything. I think the biggest difference is they’re things that are true to our experience and our culture versus if it it’s taken from outside of the culture, what other people think is interesting. There’s some schism that happens there and I think what we know to be important in our own communities is very different than what other people think is interesting. I think our stories are the more important ones when it comes to representation.
Q: In the description from the museum on your “The Artist Speaks” exhibition, it says that your identity informs your “visceral approach to representing cultural memory, collective history, and lived experience from a female Native American perspective.” How would you describe “cultural memory”? What it is, and also elements of it that stand out for you from your past?
A: There’s such a wealth of knowledge and culture to draw from in our own communities and I feel like we’re just kind of, within photography, at the beginning of telling so many of those stories. I feel like, because there was that great erasure that happened, that we can go back like 100 years and look at collective memory. I mean, I grew up with a shoebox of photos of Native people dressed in the fashion of the times. I think about all of our old, old stories and mythos and creation stories, and I try to think about how that’s relevant in contemporary times. So, for me, looking at our collective memory is everything that our culture has moved through to even be here; that’s the dark side of things. That’s erasure, that’s termination, that’s forced assimilation, that’s boarding schools, but there’s always a light side to all of those shadow things. There’s resilience, there’s things that exist against all odds — we’re here, we made it, our grandparents put so many things in place for us to have these lives that we’re living, and we’ve been making art this entire time. I think that contemporary American art collections are just kind of discovering Native art, Black American art, Asian American art, and we’ve been here the whole time making really amazing work. It feels as if we’ve arrived, but we have really age-old art making paradigms. We’ve been doing it a long time, so we’re showing up and our work is amazing and it’s amazing that we’re getting these spaces to show it for the first time.
Q: This exhibition at MOPA@SDMA is divided into “Native California,” “Imagining Indigenous Futures,” and “Native Woman.” Why are these areas you chose to focus on for this display of your work?
A: I really was looking at this idea of being the first Native American photographer to have a solo show in this gallery space in San Diego. I have a pretty keen understanding of what people outside of the Native community know and understand about Native people, and what they may be at their infancy of understanding about Native people, and I felt like these three themes could capture people’s attention and teach them the most, in one gallery setting, about Native California. That theme really being about contemporary, living people in Native California that might be in their backyard this whole time; that they have never engaged with their local, Indigenous community before, or knew that there were Native people out in the desert, not too far away. So, just a glimpse into Indigenous, Native California.
Then, “Native Woman” is really something that I feel is a theme that recurs in my work. I come from a lot of really powerful leaders in my tribe. We have an uplifting of Native women from within the community that I think I don’t see mirrored in dominant society. Women have life-giving power, women have medicine, women have innate strength, women have the ability to commune with Mother Earth, right? All of these uplifted empowerments from within our culture. That’s one of those things that, if the photograph is being taken by a White man from outside of the culture, he’s never going to be able to get that, right? So, I have this really powerful, subtle ability to collaborate with the people that I’m working with to make them larger than life, that gives them a supernatural feeling. The women in my photographs, they look omniscient, they look all-knowing, they look very powerful and that, to me, really counters the invisibility of Native women. A lot of the lowbrow stuff that’s out there, taken from outside of the culture, that contributes to things like missing and murdered Indigenous women in our community, so it’s really about giving humanity to Native women, to empowering them.
Then, with “Indigenous Futures,” our mantra since the ‘60s has been, “We’re still here.” There’s this big erasure and just trying to scream from the rooftops that we still exist. I really love Afrofuturism and Latin futurism and Indigenous futurism because it’s imagining ourselves healthy in the future. There’s such a powerful shift from just saying, “We still exist,” to “Hey, we might be healthy enough to imagine ourselves healthy in the future, to imagine Indigenous leadership in the future.” So, those pieces are really hopeful. Here, again, it’s different from the black-and-white, old-timey photographs, so I hope that people see them and they’re like, “Whoa, this is not what I would have thought of when I thought I was going to see a Native American photography show.” I hope it really just opens people’s minds up to the world of possibilities.
