Foto Féminas presents: Mónica Lozano
A selection from Latin American and Caribbean online platform Foto Féminas, curated by Verónica Sanchis Bencomo
Mónica Lozano is a Mexican-American photographer born in El Paso, Texas, USA. She was raised across the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Lozano received her masters degree in photography at TAI, Centro Universitario de Artes in Madrid, Spain. Her work has been selected for various international photo competitions and grants.
In 2011, Lozano finished the Photo Global residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York on a presidential scholarship. Lozano’s elegant and socially charged portraits have been exhibited in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Seoul, Indonesia, Portugal, Tunis, Chile, Greece, Morocco, Mexico and the United States.
Her work has been featured under the “One To Watch” article in American Photo Magazine and Columbia Journalism Review selected her for the “20 Women to Watch” list. In 2011, she collaborated with the TED Award winner JR and his Inside Out Project in Mexico where she coordinated and organised a massive action around the world called “Be The Change”, she was also featured in the Inside Out Movie at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. Lozano’s work was selected for the opening exhibition of Latin America’s first museum dedicated to photography and image founded by the Pedro Meyer Foundation in Mexico City.
Lozano is currently living in the border of Mexico and USA, teaching young students in different universities about photography and art as a way to transcend borders.
I want to begin by talking about your background. You grew up on the border between Mexico and the USA. How does growing up in that environment influence your work today?
Growing up on the border of Mexico and the US influenced my eye very profoundly. I did not know this while growing up since this was my only reality and I could not compare it to anything else. It was a constant transition between two countries that are so different. I learned how to live in the duality, in Mexico and in the US at the same time and I understood it very well. I, like many other people, was a witness to many difficult situations. My own family survived the worst years of the cartel war in 2011; this taught me how to cope with life and I believe it made me “street smart” too. The border is the place where my search for beauty began, trying to find it in the middle of life and death.
Your career began by taking a series of portraits of people on the streets of Mexico and Madrid. However, in your latest projects you have moved the subject into the photographic studio. Could you talk about how your discipline has evolved?
I love the streets and they are my constant school. After years of trying different types of photography, I found that portraiture is what I love the most and I wanted to experiment with it in the studio and see how my subjects and I reacted to this empty space. Time flows differently and the direction of the relationship of photographer and subject changes. In certain series like BORDERS, the context is not that important because the idea is precisely to decontextualise the space, so we can concentrate in the subject and the story. The use of the studio and empty space is intentional whenever I use it. For example, in Borders and Don Rene.
While you were in Spain, you also focused on the Latin American community. Have you found any similarities between the communities that reside on the US/Mexico border and Spain?
Very much so. There are so many similarities, not only in the stories of immigrants and refugees, but the way they are perceived, the way they see themselves and the outside world. There is this sense of “no belonging”. I could see the same aspects in their eyes. They leave everything behind to try and construct a new life, but at the end they are confronted with the unimaginable and it takes sometimes decades before they can start living the “dream”. It became a personal search to find truths in people’s eyes, their stories, their scars, their hopes. My question is: what do people hold on to in order to survive? I believe the immigrant’s journey is the most difficult one, especially the people who come from desperation and misfortune. Borders around the world are similar: very cruel, and even if you get to cross them there are so many borders inside that you need to keep crossing.
“It was a constant transition between two countries that are so different. I learned how to live in the duality, in Mexico and in the US at the same time and I understood it very well.”
When did you begin to work on the wall that separates USA and Mexico? How’s that been like?
I left the border when I was 19 and lived in different places for many years. During this time, my sight and my vision developed. While finding similarities between places, I always felt the need to come back to this unique place. This is the place where my work feeds from, where I grew up. This WALL is the symbol that represents this border now. It is what separates us, what controls us and what is tearing us constantly. I have been a witness to the threatening situation for the past years, now as a mother of two little boys. Seeing what is happening with families, individuals and especially kids who are the most vulnerable and fragile, they are the true victims since they did not choose the immigrant’s journey. This decision was taken for them.
Could you tell us more about your series ‘Hugs not Walls’? How did you decide to work on that location? How is this series perceived in today’s world?
This event is made possible by the Border Network of Human Rights, which helps reunite families that have been separated for years. People are given the opportunity to hug and kiss their loved ones for three minutes, so hundreds of families travel to see each other for this event that happens in the middle of the Rio Grande or through the steel wall. There are so many incredible stories from people who maybe come to meet their parents, or grandchildren. We also see the ones who come to say goodbye because they are old and sick. People are touched by this event because it is a symbol of hope and unity in the middle of this humanitarian crisis. There is a need to talk about these realities happening at the border, from the perspective of a local that lives in this subculture.
It is crucial that the reality is seen through a clear lens that focuses on humanity and not a vision of a controlled media. It is such a complex situation, and people look at it from so many perspectives. The truth is that people feel threatened by the figure of the immigrant. We are desensitised to the situation, dehumanised and blinded by our own prejudices.
Your series, ‘Borders’, is a powerful collection of different people’s backgrounds and the story of their migration. How did you learn about the individual stories?
It all started with a newspaper ad that my mother sent to me when I was living in Madrid. I was shocked to see an image of a man hidden inside of a car seat trying to illegally cross the port of entry from Mexico to the US. I thought about how desperate this man must have been in order to put himself in that position. I started to do research of stories from different borders around the world and found amazing stories of people crossing in extreme ways.
I spoke to people on the phone, met in person, read books and mostly walked in the streets of cities like Madrid, Paris, London and saw the same situation in a larger scale. Everything I saw connected to the desperation of the immigrant and how brave they have to be because of their desperation. They are living a life where they don’t belong and they don’t exist. Conscious about the problematics that are experienced in borders around the world, my objective is to create visual content precisely as a defense for the individual.
How did each individual story evolve from idea/research to the studio to appropriate the story? Are the objects you used in ‘Borders’ props or objects that belong to the subjects in the stories? Do you ever cast people for your projects?
This project has been the most difficult one so far. This is where I was confronted with my own limits, being an immigrant myself in Spain, a student with no extra money and believing in this idea. This series was so clear to me that I was submerged by it and everything started to move with synergy. I visited “Lava pies”, the neighborhood of immigrants in Madrid, very often spoke to people that to my surprise were very connected to what I wanted to do and offered to participate or agreed to do so not asking for much. There was a lot of volunteering and I tried to help out with things they needed like passport pictures, groceries, or transportation.
I never cast people for my projects. Real people and their stories are the subject. In this case, the people participating are from the same country represented in the image. They actually have a similar story. The most difficult part of this series was to find the objects. I had to imagine them and find them, because I saw the pictures in my head before doing them. It was hard to find a broken boat in the middle of Madrid, or the car seat, the mattress, the fence. I had to travel outside city limits to get those objects and borrow them, rent them or purchase them. They are objects that represent the real object used in the stories. My colleagues and dear friends from the master’s degree [program] helped out so much and again immigrants who were connected to the series. The University where I studied, Escuela Universitaria TAI, funded 12-hour rental of an amazing huge white studio, and this is where the series was done.
Why do you think it’s important to transfer the social story into the studio?
I don’t believe it is important if the image is in a studio or in the streets. I believe in telling the stories, showing the faces or the objects. When I have used the studio, I want to invite the spectator to get close to the image, ignite curiosity with no distractions. Once the spectator is close, then he can see what the image is truly about. In the ‘Borders’ series, the white space decontextualizes the space. It does not matter where it happened. This image is about the subject, their story and the object they used to cross. They are in this moment of nothingness. The immigrant has left his past life, but has not arrived to this new world. He is in the limit of two lives, thinking he will arrive to the promised land. The reality is far away from what they think it will be. They are confronted with the unimaginable.
Have you worked in any other border aside from US and Mexico?
I have collaborated with different projects with refugees in France, London, Greece and North Korea. I would like to continue doing this in the future.
Most recently, Mónica visited the US and Mexico border where she met many of the people who make their way from Latin American to the United States. She photographed all the belongs that the migrants carried.
Living in the border has made us witnesses to the devastation of the individual that occurs today right in front of my eyes. Unfortunately, this phenomenon replicates along many borders. Immigrants are forced to escape the horror they live in their countries, having no other choice than to take this traumatic journey. People are stripped from their land, home, economy, identity, language, and most of them are left with no personal belongings to survive the basic human needs. Confronted with a population who feels threatened by them, immigrants stand alone and deprived from their human rights.
The contemporary still lives captured in this series speak of an ephemeral world that forces us to rediscover the journey of the migrant, a hero of our time trapped between two increasingly cruel worlds. The intention is to approach the intimacy of stories of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, men, women and children who have experienced in their own flesh the hostility of a trip that apparently has no final destination. Their few possessions, which are often the only thing that connects them to the warmth of their origin, functions as survival kits that keep them alive in threatening moments.
These photographs were taken on July and August 2019 on the border of Ciudad Juarez and El paso TX. It is necessary to put a spotlight to the dignity and resistance of these travellers, it is urgent that our society learns to see, it is necessary to deactivate the discourses of hatred and racism. Very few dare to understand a new way of appreciating this type of resistance, resistance to survive.
— Text by Samuel Rodriguez
Click here to visit Mónica Lozano’s website. You can also follow and connect with Rueda Photos on Instagram and Facebook.
Verónica Sanchis Bencomo is the founder and curator of Foto Féminas, an online resource for promoting Latin American and Caribbean women photographers. For submissions, please visit our website.
You can also follow Foto Féminas on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
