Lens on L.A.’s Eastside
Since Rafael Cardenas was a kid, he’s carried a camera — be it a pocket-sized Kodak 110 or an old Canon Rebel. But he didn’t get serious about picture-making until he bought a professional Canon EOS 10D in 2009 from a colleague.
“I sat him down and bought him a beer so that he could show me a little bit about the camera,” Cardenas says. That informal session functioned as his photography master class.
Cardenas has since used his skills to capture Los Angeles life, primarily on the Eastside. This includes black-and-white photos of boys suspended in the bright waters of a swimming pool, a skater sailing along a sun-bleached street and a man lifting his shirt to reveal a chest tattoo of a Superman logo — not to mention countless moments of revelry and quiet contemplation.
The photographer, who was raised in East L.A. and now lives in Boyle Heights, has gathered more than 100 of these images in the limited-edition artist book “Mas Aca” (“Over Here”) — which features an introductory essay from fellow artist Harry Gamboa, a founder of the collective Asco.
Cardenas says that “Mas Aca” in many ways represents the culmination of an experiment. Shortly after that photo lesson, he decided he would take a picture a day and post it to a blog. (It’s something he still does on his website, rafa.la).
“I did it so that I could get used to the camera,” he says. A year later, he had a small show of photos at the Boyle Heights bar Eastside Luv. That led to other opportunities, with Cardenas becoming a professional photographer in the process. But it’s the artistically minded work — inky, black-and-white images that play with the subtleties between darkness and light — that most impassions him.
In 2014, Cardenas led a community portraiture project at the nonprofit arts space Self Help Graphics. That same year, he began shooting for the Public Radio International project “York & Fig,” a series that explored the topic of gentrification in Highland Park. Recently, his street images went on view at the Hollywood and Highland Metro station.
“One of the things I’ve experienced is how lucky I am that people have watched me as I’ve learned,” he says. “This is my learning process.”
As his Boyle Heights neighborhood becomes a focal point in struggles over gentrification and displacement, Cardenas says he realizes he is capturing his neighborhood during inexorable change.
But even so, it’s the picture that always comes first.
“I honestly don’t go out with an intention to shoot a specific thing,” he explains. “I kind of just go about my day and carry my camera and shoot whatever is around.
“The challenge is to make it good and make it for me,” he adds. “It’s doing it for the art.”