Concord Monitor – Hood Museum of Art presents exhibition of photographs by Cara Romero

Hood Museum of Art presents exhibition of photographs by Cara Romero

“Zenith” by Cara Romero
Courtesy

Published: 12-19-2023 5:00 PM

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The Hood Museum of Art will present the first major solo museum exhibition of photographs by Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero, titled Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light). The exhibition will be on view at the Hood Museum from Jan. 18 through June 21, 2025, and will feature over 50 works, including several never-before-seen photographs, and site-specific installations that will invite the viewer behind the scenes to experience the sets of Romero’s most iconic photographs.

An exhibition catalog co-published by the Hood Museum of Art and Radius Books will be released in June 2025. The exhibition is curated by Jami Powell, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Hood Museum of Art.

Says Romero, “The Hood Museum of Art under the leadership of curator Jami Powell and director John Stomberg is an excellent example of how an American museum can create meaningful and positive impacts on Native community, representation, and living artists. When offered my first major solo show to commence at the Hood, I cried because I never imagined this was possible for a Native woman photographer in her 40s. I am so honored to collaborate with this institution and the people making it a major force in sidelining preconceived notions about Native American art.”

Adds Powell, “Cara Romero is an immensely generous storyteller, and her images invite people into complex and transformative dialogues about the histories and lives of Indigenous peoples. Romero’s photographs provide opportunities for two audiences to recognize the humanity of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples and ask questions they might otherwise be afraid to ask.” 

Romero, of Inglewood, CA, is an artist known for dramatic fine art photography that examines Indigenous life in contemporary contexts. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero was raised between contrasting settings: the rural Chemehuevi reservation in Mojave Desert, California, and the urban sprawl of Houston, Texas. Informed by her identity, Romero’s visceral approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences results in a blending of fine art and editorial styles. Maintaining a studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Romero regularly participates in Native American art fairs and panel discussions and was featured on PBS’s Craft in America in 2019.

Her award-winning work is included in numerous public and private collections, domestically and internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Amon Carter Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, and Forge Project Collections, among others. Romero travels between Santa Fe and the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation, where she maintains close ties to her tribal community and ancestral homelands.

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Having visited the likes of Patagonia, Svalbard and Greenland, Burnham Arlidge admits that his recent journey to the Falklands, South Georgia and Antarctica was the best photography trip he’s ever been on.

Burnham says: “Working as a photographer, I’ve been lucky enough to visit some of the most incredible locations on Earth. I’ve stalked Polar Bears in the Canadian Arctic, gazed at the northern lights in Greenland, and wondered at hanging glaciers in Patagonia. Few places on the planet, however, have left me with a gallery of photographs quite like this trip. 

“The composition options, the lights, the dramatic landscapes; it’s just unbelievable.”

He took a South Georgia, Antarctica and Falklands Explorer trip provided by Swoop Antarctica. The 21-day adventure takes travellers on a small ship cruise to remote and underexplored areas of Antarctica, South Georgia and The Falkland Islands.

“The size of the vessel frees you to dock up in tight, isolated bays where no one has been in years. You don’t have a set itinerary or know which precise inlet you’ll be heading to. Instead, you sail with the weather and it dictates where you dock.

“Of course, you know the region you are heading to and the number of days you will be staying there but not the exact location you’ll be. As a result, you get up close to undisturbed wildlife and landscapes that you would never otherwise see.”

Highlights of the three-week trip include seeing the largest king penguin colonies on the planet, zodiac cruising through crinkling brash ice in Antarctica and visiting the farms in the westernmost settled outposts in the Falklands that have been owned by families for hundreds of years.

Your journey begins with a flight to the world’s southernmost city, Ushuaia. Upon arrival, you’ll be whisked away to a five-star hotel overlooking the Beagle Channel where you can rest and recharge from your travels for the next two nights.

After a leisure day in Ushuaia, during which you can visit Tierra del Fuego National Park, sample the local king crab regional speciality or explore the city and its hiking routes, the real adventure begins as you board the small ship. 

The vessel’s expedition team and officers greet and welcome you onto the 139-passenger ship which features state-of-the-art stabilisers and sleek, spacious suites.

After a fine dining experience, sit down and take snapshots of the glorious mountain scenery as you set sail along the Beagle Channel, passing Magellanic penguins, Rock Cormorants, and sea lion colonies en route to the Falkland Islands.

Drift by icebergs along the Southern Ocean the next day, accompanied by albatrosses, prions, and petrels as they follow the vessel. The expedition team keeps a careful watch on the surroundings, ever ready to highlight whales and dolphins along the way. 

You will also be invited to an informative onboard presentation on the wildlife, history and geology of the Falkland Islands and the Southern Ocean. Additionally, you can actively engage by participating in seabird sighting surveys or contributing to the collection of salinity samples and weather data.

The fifth day is spent exploring the westernmost settled outposts in the Falklands which are home to remote farms that have been owned by families for seven generations. The wild, windswept landscape is devoid of trees and completely silent and undisturbed, bar the lively vibrant local wildlife.

Sheep graze alongside albatrosses and rockhopper, king, and macaroni penguin rookeries, while Caracas fly overhead and upland geese graze by the curling waves of the white sand beaches. 

“It was surreal – it felt like Hawaii but with penguins everywhere. My favourite shot I took here was one of the penguins on the beach. It looked like they were holidaying in the Caribbean.”

While here, you can visit homesteads and gain unique insights into the lives of those living in this remote area over a cup of tea and cakes. 

The next day, you will be taken to Stanley, the capital city of the Falkland Islands. Explore the unique metropolis on foot, popping into shops selling locally-made wool garments, visiting the museum and investigating the lively pub scene. You can also spot sea lions and dolphins in the harbour and bird life by Gypsy Cove.

Over the next two days, you will travel east across the Antarctic Convergence on your way to South Georgia. You’ll be able to spot wildlife from the ship’s deck and listen to fascinating presentations on the region’s history.

Come day nine, you reach South Georgia. Nicknamed the Serengeti of the South, it is famed for its high populations of penguins and seals. Its marine ecosystem is one of the world’s densest examples of biodiversity.

“I’ve been close to wildlife before, particularly in the Galapagos Islands but the backdrop of South Georgia is so dramatic. We’re talking towering ice-peak mountains in close proximity to thousands of penguins. It makes for incredible photo after incredible photo. And the light there is constantly changing. No matter what time of day you go ashore, you’re guaranteed something new.

“The wildlife is magnificent here. Even just on the beaches, you’re getting huge elephant seals, aggressive fur seals, macaroni penguins, albatrosses, petrels, skuas, and gulls everywhere. It’s like walking through a nature documentary. It’s something you really have to see to believe.”

You’ll also come across hundreds of thousands of king penguins of all ages, from fuzzy chicks to mature adults. 

The region’s unique location is to thank for its sensational wildlife scene. It is situated within the Antarctic Convergence but outside the limit of the yearly sea ice. Consequently, the 3,755 square kilometre island is home to tens of millions of breeding penguins, seals and seabirds. 

Spend the next three days snapping sensational shots of the wildlife, towering mountains, immense glaciers, rugged coastline and tabular icebergs. 

You can visit the Grytviken whaling station during your time in South Georgia. It is the first shore-based whaling station for Antarctic whaling. You’ll also be taken to the Norwegian seamen’s church, the active British Antarctic Survey station and the tiny graveyard where the legendary polar explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton, is buried.

Over the next two days, you gradually navigate through a growing number of icebergs as you journey southward aboard the vessel, heading towards the trip’s final visit destination: The Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands. Informative presentations and wildlife watches will keep you entertained along the way. 

As you approach the Antarctic Peninsula, your expedition leader and captain will draw up a three-night itinerary based on the weather and ice conditions. Entering the region from the east, you come across the northern boundary of the Weddell Sea.

The area is thriving with wildlife, as it marks the point where a large cold body of water rotates clockwise driving cold water and ice north towards South Georgia and the South Orkney Islands. The ocean currents derive nutrients from the deep, feeding countless species of marine animals. 

“Antarctica’s landscape is simply alien. Ethereal, beautiful but undeniably strange. It offers such a contrast to The Falklands and South Georgia. 

“My favourite moment in Antarctica was when we were on a zodiac cruise to see wildlife. The light was coming through the clouds giving this blue glow. We were just zodiacing through brash ice as it crinkled and crackled below us.”

Drift by tabular icebergs and groups of whales as seabirds soar across the sky above you. Spend the days visiting the most scenic bays and channels of the Peninsula and visiting penguin rookeries of Adelie, Chinstrap and Gentoo.

You’ll also see crabeater, leopard, Antarctic fur and elephant seal wallows, bird colonies and minke, orca and humpback whale feeding areas. After four days, you will begin your two-night homeward journey along Drake Passage back to Ushuaia.

After disembarking on your final day, you will catch an afternoon flight to Buenos Aires.

Burnham has some advice for other photographers thinking about taking the same trip: 

“These destinations are on a scale almost unmatched anywhere else on Earth. So, take your time – the wildlife is all around you, you don’t need to rush. Also, get low. The animals are low to the ground so you should be too. Get into their world. Lastly, you don’t need to bring long lenses because the wildlife is always right next to you. Bring wide-angle lenses instead to capture the drama. Finally, be as creative as you can and don’t lose your camera in the water!”

There’s a stillness at the heart of An-My Lê’s photographs, no matter what turmoil they record. The hubbub of cities, the pantomimed passions of street protests, the frenzy of a neighbourhood soccer game — all freeze theatrically, as in a diorama. Her work, now in a viscerally satisfying exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, transforms everyday reality into a sequence of set pieces that seem archetypal even when they’re just pictures of people hanging out on a street corner or clouds scudding across the sky. The action orbits around a central hush, as if the world were never too busy to pause its rounds for her camera.

Lê’s first New York survey covers three decades of her peripatetic career. Born in Vietnam in 1960, she fled with her family to California in 1975, after the fall of Saigon. They alighted in Sacramento, and two years later she enrolled at Stanford. While working towards a masters in biology, she took a photography class, a choice that set her down on the rocky road of art.

Her timing was perfect: in 1994, the year after she graduated from Yale’s masters of fine art programme, President Bill Clinton lifted the US trade embargo on Vietnam. Lê travelled to her native country for the first time in 19 years. The show opens with what she calls a “self-portrait” but is actually a Vietnamese girl roughly the same age as the photographer was when she left. We see her in profile, her face unlined but sombre, already marked by sorrow. 

This wistful, tender photo stands out in a body of work that generally plays down feeling in favour of fact. It reminds me of Lewis Hine’s angry yet resoundingly humane portraits of child workers, which bared the wrongs inflicted on America’s youngest citizens. Lê does something similar, balancing dignity and compassion.

In another photo of the same girl — not in the exhibition but reproduced in the catalogue — we get a more inclusive view of her life: dirty, ill-fitting clothes, weathered hands, bare feet treading tall, prickly grass. 

It’s less a study of an individual than a report on existence constricted by poverty and labour, closer to Walker Evans’s sober, forensic portraits of Alabama sharecroppers in their tumbledown homes, pinned in place by circumstances beyond their control. Like Evans, Lê favours a large-format camera with a long exposure, which allows her to pack the view with detail and produce images of static monumentality. 

Her Vietnam homecoming left her disoriented: “I felt I didn’t recognise anything in Vietnam.” She alludes to that feeling obliquely in a street scene taken in Ho Chi Minh City. A knot of men in white shirts, dark pants, and sandals (plus one woman and one child) shield their eyes to gaze up at a solar eclipse. Uncle Ho himself looks benevolently down on his people from a banner at their backs. The past has become two-dimensional, the future is blinding.

Rattled by the country’s rapid urban change, she ventured to the Mekong Delta to shoot deep-focus views that have an ageless, idyllic quality. A farming family poses in the middle distance, haloed by a circle of palm trees and a pen full of ducks. Another household, shaded by lush vegetation, dwells by waters so still and glossy they could be a sheet of marble.

When she returned to Vietnam again in 2011, having exchanged black and white for colour, Lê seemed less startled and more analytical. Her Delta series juxtaposes the experiences of teenage girls near the Mekong and the Mississippi. Even though 9,000 miles and vastly different cultures separate the adolescents of Ho Chi Minh City and New Orleans, we watch both groups on parallel tracks, slipping into adult gravity.

War threads its way through her work, but indirectly, in pictures of exercises, games, civil-war statues and fake soldiers. “Small Wars” (1999-2002) features Vietnam war re-enactors in Virginia and North Carolina. Most of the participants had never been in combat but enjoyed the fantasy. In exchange for permission to photograph these events, Lê agreed to play the role of a South Vietnamese Viet Cong fighter. 

The make-believe gives her photos of a downed fighter jet shrouded in mist, or pretend GIs crouching in the foliage, a movie-like look of authenticity. “My pictures stand in complete opposition to combat photography,” she has said. “We are dealing with parallel subjects, but the outcome — the meaning — is completely different.” Her work doesn’t read as anti-war messaging, either, but as a comment on conflict as spectacle.

Even the real military concocts fictional battles. She shot the series 29 Palms in 2003-04 at a base in California where Marines trained for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The desert and the smoke are genuine; the danger isn’t. These photos lack crackle, maybe because Lê positioned herself too far from the action to reproduce much excitement or emotional depth.

Since 2015, disparate projects scattered around the US have cohered into Silent General, a panoramic portrait of a country riven by fear, political chasms and incompatible visions of the future. “I’ve been making this series to relieve anxiety about what’s been going on in the past few years — division, chaos, racial tensions, all stuff I would not have felt so deeply five years ago,” she has said. “What makes America America? The wilderness, the vastness, our sense of history.”

You sense those tremors most powerfully in her pictures of teens, who are never wild or dissipated, just numbly rehearsing for their next chapter. They flop on the ground after a Black Lives Matter protest in Washington, DC, mill around during a gun control rally in New York, enjoy a Fourth of July picnic in New Orleans in ways she can massage into formal compositions.

In the Fourth of July scene, the arrangement of young bodies on the riverbank soon gels into a mash-up of Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” and Seurat’s “Île de la Grande Jatte”. The Impressionists, too, chronicled moments of serenity amid shudders of change. Lê has found her great subject in that ongoing subterranean struggle, the tension between the mundane and the seismic that Baudelaire called “the heroism of modern life”.

To March 16, moma.org