Little boxes
Cara Romero’s photograph Naomi is both enigmatic and involving. A young woman, wearing and surrounded by an intriguing assortment of objects, stands in a boxlike opening. “I had this idea to do doll boxes,” Romero said. “It was about representation, about how we [Native people] never see ourselves accurately represented with dolls. If you look at dolls in truck stops, they’re always very pan-Indian. They never do us justice. They’re always disappointing.”
Romero grew up on the Chemehuevi Valley Indian reservation in California’s Mojave Desert, but the shape of her new First American Girls series was inspired by an avocation of her husband, Cochiti potter Diego Romero. (The two exhibit at Indian Market this year in Booth 509 SFT.) The G.I. Joe dolls that he collects come in extravagant doll boxes. When the couple searched for something similar in a Native American doll for their daughter, they came up blank.
The model for Naomi is a Northern Chumash woman from San Luis Obispo. “Her mother is a celebrated regalia-maker in California and she married into Jemez Pueblo. She asked me years ago when we shared a booth if I would photograph her material, photograph her daughter in her dress, and as luck would have it, they moved here.” Romero shot the woman wearing necklaces of pine nuts and olivella snails, abalone, and clamshells; an abalone-decorated dress; and a traditional basket hat and face tattoos. Arranged around her figure are a winnowing basket and other traditional Chumash items, along with several big pine cones.
The outside box frame is decorated with a grid of black-and-white triangles; this pattern relates to the appearance of scales on a pine cone and shows up in traditional Chumash beadwork. The inside of the box is hot pink. “That black-and-white pattern and the hot pink makes it modern California,” Romero said. “It celebrates the mom’s regalia making, and it’s a way to almost put it in a museum diorama so you can see visually all the uses, all the importance of the objects to a modern Chumash woman.”
In describing the piece, the photographer mentioned conflicts ongoing in California regarding the harvesting of abalone and seaweed. “I also do a lot of environmental work,” Romero said. “I produce a conference once a year in San Francisco for Bioneers.” She is the director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program.
But she has been busy with photography. At Santa Fe Indian Market last year, she won a best-of-class award, two best-of-division awards, and two first-place awards. She has taken home six awards from the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair during the last decade. And she is the mother of three children, her youngest five years old. That’s Paris, who shows up in her photography. In Nipton Highway, a 2014 photo, he’s a baby being held up high by Santiago Romero, Diego’s adult son, standing in the middle of a country highway. The wide, panoramic work was created by joining several images, with the spaces on either side of the figures populated by many Joshua trees. “In this one, I did set out to do a landscape, but I thought it was really important to do it where I’m from. I find immense beauty in Laura Gilpin’s work from the Mojave Desert.
“The photos are stitched together and you can see the film edges. I laid some vintage paper over it, which to me gave it that California feel. When I play with color, I’m really playing with the psychology of it and how it makes you feel, and if you can identify the place and the time and maybe the temperature of where you’re at.”
Jenna is another arresting image of a woman, this time focused in close profile and posing in a boxing stance, gloves and all. “I’m always interested in things I haven’t done before, especially with Native women,” Romero said. “Sometimes it’s about the narrative, sometimes it’s about asserting that we’re here in contemporary times: a counter-narrative to what I call the one-story narrative of [photographer Edward] Curtis. This is celebrating her beautiful physique and the concept that she’s a Native MMA [mixed martial arts] hero. And I’m borrowing some of the modern commercial techniques like sports photographers Howard Schatz and
Manny Pacquaio, where they strip-light their muscles on a black background that psychologically lets the viewer know that this is modern.”
Romero sometimes shoots on location, but she uses studio lighting on almost everything she does. “We [Native Americans] don’t get to see ourselves represented that way, in kind of a mainstream pop manner, so I have a lot of fun working with high-fashion lighting. A lot of it is staged and theatrical.”
Her work also has a definite documentary aspect: the presentation of the portraits varies, but the message of Strong Native Woman does not. Her issue-laden artistic outlook goes back to her studies at the University of Houston in the late 1990s. Her program focus was cultural anthropology, but her direction swerved after she studied with protest photographer Bill Thomas. Her “first big aha moment,” as she put it, arrived with a staged picture of an AIDS sufferer.
“The shot was staged, but it was based on when I used to take a neighbor in the arts district to lunch because he was low-income. When he took out his HIV cocktail one day, everybody stopped and stared. Then I asked him if we could recreate that to make a statement about the stigma. It became an AIDS awareness campaign in Houston,” she said.
“Today, I do fine art but it has a commercial flair, because I went to school for both — they came together in a commercial documentary style.” Her image Kaa was created to evoke double-negative prints from traditional film photography. “That’s Kaa Folwell, and she’s painted in clay from my reservation and another photo of a Mesa Verde vessel is overlaid. Her hair was captured at 1/8,000th of a second. That was to show that fiery, temperamental nature of working with clay, and to evoke the emotion of that moment when the clay chemically changes.”
The people in Romero’s photographs are all friends and family, but she always puts a priority on interviewing her subjects. “That’s because I really want them to tell their story. I don’t want to exploit them. I really enjoy working with the beauty in our backyard, and helping people tell their own stories, these diverse stories.”
An example is Ty, which brought Romero her highest Market award last year. A glowing profile is complemented by a woven backdrop adorned with a variety of Greek-style crosses and white shell necklaces. The artist mentioned White Shell Woman from Diné culture. “They got their white shells from California,” she said. “Chemehuevis are the desert traders, which we know is how all the Southwest tribes received their things from the coast. It was a huge trade route into Chaco Canyon. So I went and got some of the most sacred shells, olivella shells. I spent a week cleaning and stringing them around her neck.”
Ty loves the photo, Romero said. “It’s so great when they take the photograph home to their moms and their grandmas. There’s so much that goes on behind the scenes in how we adorn our young children. I think it’s very unique to Native culture, to spend that much time and love making sure that your young child has the finest of all the cultural resources, fashioned with the highest art and craftsmanship.”
Romero, who is represented by Robert Nichols Gallery, is enjoying her first solo show, Everywhen:
Indigenous Photoscapes, at Peters Projects. “This is a coming-of-age ceremony, to start at IAIA [the Institute of American Indian Arts] and have my first solo show in downtown Santa Fe,” she said. “We used to go up and down Canyon Road on Friday nights for the free wine and cheese, and we were like, ‘You have to be from somewhere else to make it in Santa Fe.’ It was like a dream come true when Mark [Del Vecchio, Peters Projects director] asked me to show.”