Episode 10
Seeing Ourselves in Louis Carlos Bernal’s Photographic Revolution:
Elizabeth Ferrer

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe  Race Remix. Welcome to Race Remix Conversations with Outstanding Artist Thought Leaders and Makers of Culture curated to help you unlock the power of imagination and experience the impossible as possible. Have you ever wondered how art becomes activism? Today we bring you a conversation with writer Elizabeth Ferrer, who takes us from the Chicano murals of her East Los Angeles childhood to groundbreaking exhibitions on Latin text photography.

Guest host Gia Del Pino and Lizzy Guevara speak with Elizabeth about her retrospective on Louis Carlos Bernal, a trailblazing Chicano photographer who centered Mexican-American lives and traditions through striking deeply human portraits. Bernal’s images challenge stereotypes and expand the canon of American photography. In this episode, learn about how photographs do more than reflect the culture as it is how self-representation can dignify and transform.

How we see ourselves and our communities, and how images can transport the spirit of an individual subject into a cultural movement. The Louis Carlos Bernal retrospective can be viewed at the Center for Creative Photography through March 15th, 2025, at the University of Arizona.

 

Gia Del Pino  Hi everyone, and welcome to Race Remix. I’m Gia Del Pino.

 

Lizzy Guevara  And I’m Lizzy Guevara.

 

Gia Del Pino  Today we’re speaking with Elizabeth Ferrer, a curator and author specializing in Latina and Mexican art in photography. She formerly served as a vice president and chief curator at BRIC, a nonprofit arts and media organization based in Brooklyn, New York. Hi, Elizabeth.

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  Hi, everybody. It’s a real pleasure to be with all of you today.

 

Gia Del Pino  Wonderful. It’s worth mentioning that Lizzy and I both work at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, home to a premiere research collection of American photographic fine arts and archives. The center fosters creative inquiry, dialog and appreciation of photography’s cultural impact. We mention this because we recently collaborated with today’s guest, Elizabeth. It’s so wonderful to have a more personal conversation with you and about your life, your work and your recent exhibition, Louis Carlos Bernard Retrospectiva.

So congratulations.

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  Thank you.

 

Lizzy Guevara  Tell us how you began your journey into the arts and where you were born and raised and some background about your life.

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  Absolutely. Thank you. So I was born in East Los Angeles, California, which has always been a largely Mexican-American neighborhood. And, you know, it was kind of a typical East L.A. upbringing, pretty conservative Catholic family, very, very close family. Not a lot of exposure to the arts, unfortunately. I mean, that kind of came from really kind of an oddball mix of things.

I would say that my earliest inspiration in terms of looking at art and loving art actually came from the family Bible, which was a big kind of fancy home and looking at these beautiful Renaissance paintings in full color. And I would look at those all the time. But at the same time, when I was growing up, this was the era of the Chicano Civil Rights movement.

And a lot of young artists were painting on the walls of, you know, bodegas, schools, public buildings. And that just blew me away because on the one hand, I saw this sort of mysterious, solemn religious art in the books, and then I saw this, you know, monumental, lively art in the making in the streets where I lived. And, you know, all that really fed into a love of art that I always have had.

And I would say the other thing that I think is pertinent to this conversation is that that was back in the day when people subscribe to these weekly Illustrated magazines like Life and Look, and my mom got them all and I just devoured them. And so, you know, in retrospect, looking at these great photo essays by, you know, people like W. Eugene Smith, it had a big impact on me.

I loved looking at those photographs. I kept those magazines, looked at them over and over again. And, you know, that eventually became my passion.

 

Lizzy Guevara  Did you ever experiment with making art yourself?

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  I mean, yeah, a little bit. I mean, you know, like as a kid painting and enjoying that. But really in high school, taking up photography, I got a hold of a 35 millimeter camera and I used to make photo essays from from songs like from Bob Dylan music or Joni Mitchell music and with kind of create scenes that went along.

And then I would print the photos and put them in notebooks. So yeah, I definitely had the bug and the desire to really delve into photography. I think I learned early on or I became aware early on that I wasn’t going to become a professional photographer. I didn’t have that drive. But I did have the passion for photography.

And after studying photography a couple of years in college, I switched to art history and that really put me on my path to becoming the curator and a writer.

 

Lizzy Guevara  Do you remember the first work or the first sort of pieces that made you want to step into the role of curator?

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  You know, it’s really funny because I think, as I mentioned, the sources, the influences that I’ve had have been really diverse. You know, I’m pretty I’m very universal in my tastes. But I also remember in high school when I had a car going over to the Pasadena Museum of Art Museum that no longer exists, but it was a very progressive institution in its time.

So a lot of abstract art. And I remember seeing, for example, Frank Stella’s big hard edged paintings and just being blown away by the scale and art that was abstract. And it just opened my eyes to a more contemporary form of art. And so, you know how all these things fed into the kinds of interests I have now, I can’t really say.

But I would also note that, you know, going back to seeing the the murals by young Chicano artists that were being made, you know, somehow I was trying to put together the kind of art that I wanted to work with, which for me, you know, I wanted to be excited about it. I wanted the art to be meaningful.

And, you know, certainly seeing this work by Chicano artists being played on the streets, that just, you know, opened my eyes to how art could be really relevant to a community. You know, Chicano artists were not being shown at the Pasadena Museum of Art as much as I love the work I saw. But, you know, seeing these other art forms in public art gave me in-roads to thinking about, you know, how I could eventually work with artists and actual while for me to all put it together for a while, I spent a lot of time in Mexico curating contemporary Mexican art.

And that also goes back to my heritage. You know, I wanted to learn about my Mexican roots, and it was only after working with Mexican art for several years that I realized that I really wanted to work with artists closer to home, which for me has been in New York, but also in L.A., where I’m from and where I travel back to often.

 

Gia Del Pino  I’m hoping we can focus a little bit more on your time in Mexico and then delve a little bit deeper in this trajectory from working in art in Mexico and focusing on Mexican-American art and Latin. They are here in the United States. So you could curated a significant exhibition such as Lola Alvarez Bravo in 2006 and authored the book A Shadow Born of Earth New Photography in Mexico, 1993 to 1995.

How did your work begin to evolve from researching Mexican art to Chicano Latinx art?

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  So I probably spent a good ten years traveling back and forth between New York and mostly Mexico City, also to Oaxaca and a few other cities. And what was so exciting about that is that there was a really vibrant art scene in Mexico throughout the nineties. And at the same time, the 1992 Columbus Quincentennial occurred and that just really opened the floodgates to opportunities to curate exhibitions and present work of Mexican artists in the United States.

There was a lot of interest. Museums wanted to kind of get on that bandwagon. So I was really fortunate to be able to curate a show like a Shadow Born of Earth, which was an exhibition of contemporary Mexican photography, and it traveled to something like ten or 12 venues across the United States. And then the Lola Alvarez Bravo exhibition was actually first started as an invitation from Aperture, by the publisher that we are working with for the Louis Carlos Bernal book, The Center for Creative Photography, had recently received the Lola Alvarez Bravo Archive and work with Aperture to create the first kind of major book in English about Lola’s work.

And fortunately, I was one of the last people to interview Lola during her lifetime, and I knew a lot of the people that were very close to her. So that was also just a very important project. I think at that point in time, maybe not so much now, but then she was very overlooked. You know, her one time husband, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, was considered the great master, and Lola was just seen as the spouse.

But this book and exhibition really demonstrated her own really special talents and importance. So all those projects and there were many more were wonderful to work on. They were seen in many museums and they had a big, enthusiastic audience. But as I mentioned, I just became more and more aware that there were also photographers closer to home that were not getting nearly the same amount of attention.

And I think one thing I realized at one point is that it’s easier. It was easier. And I think this is still true to go to a gallery in New York that sells the work of well-known Mexican photographers. Then it is to find the work of Latinx photographers, and it just seemed like a big gap. There’s an organization in New York called In En Foco.

It’s a nonprofit organization started in the mid 1970s as a photographers collective. And the director at that time, Charles Biasiny Rivera, who recently passed, asked me if I’d like to get involved. He actually initially asked me if I’d like to edit an issue of their magazine devoted to Mariana Yampolsky, who was an American photographer who really spent her entire career in Mexico.

And I gladly did that. And then that led to during or curating shows and working on other projects with them. And I began to meet all of the photographers involved with En Foco in New York, you know, most mostly Puerto Rican photographers. And I later became involved with an exhibition that was organized by Photofest in Houston of Latinx photographers.

This was in the mid 1990s, and it was the very first major exhibition of Latin photography. And actually there has not been one since then. I was to write the catalog for that exhibition. The catalog and fortunately never came to pass, but that opened my eyes to Latin photographers throughout the United States Puerto Rican, Cuban American, especially Chicano in the Southwest.

And because that book didn’t happen, at a certain point, I had to put it all aside for a while because I was also working, you know, at a regular institution. But after a few years, I decided, you know, this is something that just really needs to happen. I had the research, I had the contacts with the photographers, and I just began to write the book, that next photography in the United States.

It took a few years. I think tellingly, once I finished writing it, I found a publisher very quickly. And I think this just has to do with the fact that more and more people do recognize that Latin art and photography is an undertone aspect of American art history. And there’s a thirst for this knowledge. There’s certainly a thirst for it among among students and younger people.

And so, you know, that book eventually spawned panel discussions and more projects and ultimately led to the Louis Carlos Bernal exhibition that I curated for the center.

 

Lizzy Guevara  I really enjoyed how the book was broken up into the themes and wasn’t necessarily a time based. Can you expand on the way that you chose to break up the book and and how that fed into the larger themes of a lot of the work?

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  Yes, that was actually difficult when I had first started working with photo on their exhibition of like next photography. They were looking at the three largest Latinx population groups in the United States. So Cuban American, Puerto Rican and Chicano. And the show was organized that way. And the book was going to be organized that way. And, you know, I think that’s valid because although we are all Latin and have, you know, certain fundamental things that unite us, we’re also very different.

We’re different geographically, the way we speak Spanish, our histories, our current challenges. And so after a lot of thinking and just kind of fiddling with how I would put together a book, I finally decided to do it thematically because these things that unite us are so strong. So, for example, home, family, ideas around the border and immigration and diasporas.

And that’s ultimately the way that I divided up the book and talked about the photographers. And I think it became a very enriching exercise in terms of creating a history that is not necessarily fully linear, but that advances a sense of the richness of Latinx photography throughout the United States. You know, and there’s just so much I mean, there’s also, you know, modes of conceptual photography.

There are important latinxs photographers who are working in the social media space. There’s a Latin next photographer who, you know, who was one of the first digital photographers. So it’s a very rich and complex history.

 

Lizzy Guevara And in that idea of identity and the way that you chose or narrowed down how to title the book Latinx Photography United States, what made you choose Latinx instead of Chicano or Hispanic or, you know, various other terms?

 

Elizabeth Ferrar   That was another challenge. I think that when I was writing the book, Latinx was coming into play as a more prevalent term. You know, certainly in academia and in the art world, there was still a lot of resistance to it, you know, and just as one example, I had been asked by a Museo Del Barrio to moderate a panel discussion for an exhibition called Down These Mean Streets, which was about urban photography, primarily by photographers of color, and I’d say primarily Latinx.

And after the photographers all spoke, the first question that came was, What is it about? What is this Latinx? What is that? So we ended up having a longer conversation about that term than about the photography. And I realized that in the broader community, it’s not necessarily a term that’s accepted. It’s certainly a term that has met with resistance by older people, however they define themselves.

I see it as a term that is still very useful because although it started as a a term that is meant to be non-gender specific, which I think is very important at this point in time, I also see it as a term that invites the intersectionality of all of us. So, you know, we can be Latinx and Chicano or Latinx and Boricua Puerto Rican, however we define ourselves, and we can be Latinx and queer or, you know, Latinx and somebody who also identifies as strongly with, you know, some kind of photography or art form.

And so I still use that. I still find it a term that that has relevance. I see more and more in print the use of Latinate, which I think is also something that is useful because it is also not gender specific. I think that we’re never going to come up with the perfect term, and I think that’s the problem.

You know, Latinx still refers to the Latin side of our identity or the European side of our of our identity. And, you know, that is something that we tend to resist. And so maybe someday someone will come up with that perfect term, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet.

 

Lizzy Guevara  Elizabeth, we love to invite you to read a passage from your book that summarizes the bigger thesis.

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  Absolutely. The work of each figure profiled in Latinx photography in the United States is informed by a unique set of circumstances and ideals whose variety demonstrates that there is no monolithic category of Latinx photography or, more broadly, Latinx art. Just as there is no singular mindset to be ascribed to Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban-Americans and other Latinx groups and artists across the United States, I offer this study of Latin photographers to create recognition of their achievements and with the hope that their ergs will be seen as integral to American photography and to critical discourses on the medium.

 

Gia Del Pino  That’s great. It also resonates with me because it reminds me of the various ways that we all approach the arts from different standing points. I grew up studying art. I also earned my MFA and I’m currently pursuing my Ph.D. here at the University of Arizona. What interests me in art and my focus in art is work with a political imperative, whether it’s representing those who have been historically misrepresented or challenging systems of oppression.

This connects me to my background as a second generation daughter of immigrants who have often seen images of people like my family and my community being maligned by mainstream media. I’m also drawn to art that activates spaces and engages audiences and learning about the invisible power structures that oppressed and harm individuals and communities. So all that to say that I’m deeply interested in the intersection of art and activism.

 

Lizzy Guevara  Yes. In that vein, Elizabeth, we’ve seen you describe yourself as an arts activist. Could you tell us more about what that means to you? And do you feel that inclination has roots in your upbringing?

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  Certainly so. I think that arts activism can take many forms, right? And for me, it really has to do with the artists that I work with and how it is presented and the audiences that I hope to attract. Just by nature, I’ve never been drawn to working with really well-known artists or famous artists. I’ve always been more interested in artists that are unknown, little known, perhaps the underdog, maybe those with that who work with quirky languages that are not well understood.

I always like to be able to dig in and present something that may be new to an audience, create new scholarship. That’s so important to me to not repeat what others have done, but really to kind of break new ground and to create a discourse that certainly took place when I was working with contemporary Mexican artists during the 1980s.

I when I was writing exhibition catalog essays, I was really struck by the fact that very often I was writing the very first text in English and that it needed to be clear and informative and accurate. And I took that very seriously when I was at Brick, which we haven’t talked about very much, but I was there for 15 years.

Brick was really committed to cultural diversity and to level the playing field for artists. So, you know, over the course of any one year, you would see a very diverse group of artists, whether in terms of race or gender, age, the media that they work with, the subject matters that they approached. And we also placed a big emphasis on audience and being a very welcoming and accessible place.

We really created kind of a second home for artists at Brick, and I was just so happy that we could exist on that level as a place that presented rigorously curated art and created scholarship. And on the other hand, a place that anybody in Brooklyn who was interested in the arts could come and learn and, you know, get inspiration and education from the exhibitions that were on view.

So, you know, in terms of my current work, I think that, you know, working with Latinx photographers and more recently with a Chicano photographer like Bernal certainly goes back to my own upbringing in East L.A., You know, having grown up around the civil rights movement, really too young to participate, but to see it in action and to understand that the role that activism could have in giving people a sense of agency, a sense of the possibility for self-representation, for self-determination.

And that’s really one of the main motivations behind Bernal’s work. Louis Carlos Bernal was very conscious of the fact that before him, Mexican-Americans tended to be represented in derogatory ways or were stereotyped, and he wanted to use the camera to present an honest, dignified, respectful image of Mexicans, American people. You know, he was photographing his own community, so he wanted to create work that was for Mexican-American people.

And he also wanted to act as a bridge to present Mexican-American people to the broader world. So having the opportunity to create a major project about Bernal’s work, a project that I hope puts him into the canon of American photography. It’s my form of activism. It’s my form of, you know, righting the wrongs or correcting the omissions in the history of art and the history of photography.

 

Lizzy Guevara  Yeah, it’s it’s very evident in the show. Louis Carlos Bernal retrospective on view at the Center for Creative Photography until May 15, 2025, along with the companion publication Louis Carlos Burnham, on a graphic published by the CCP in Aperture. They’re both such amazing resources for the community, for art historians, for photographers, and I think it’s just such an amazing time that we have this beautiful show at the center.

Before we take a deeper dive into the project and Bernal’s legacy. Could you share a bit more about who he was? Who is Louis Carlos Bernal, as you’ve been in this project for for many years now?

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  So I find the life of Louis Carlos Bernal fascinating. He had a relatively brief life, but one that was very impactful. He was born in 1941 in Douglas, Arizona, which is right on the border. He was born to, you know, a fairly poor family. His father worked in the local mining industry in copper mines. His mother was was a maid.

And, you know, he he witnessed racism. He experienced racism. I would say that the family were, you know, were strivers. They wanted to make sure that their kids were well-educated. They eventually moved to Phenix, where Louis and his two brothers would receive a better education. And they, you know, moved more or less into the middle class. Louis went to Catholic school and later he went to Arizona State University.

Fairly early on, he discovered photography. I understood that he used to wear a little toy camera around his neck as a kid. It never wasn’t one that actually worked, but he always wore it. And so he was always kind of fascinated by photography. And then at age of 11, he received a brownie camera as a gift from a relative.

And that really began the passion that he had for cameras and the whole process of making photographs. And pretty early on, he had made a darkroom out of his family’s bathroom. So he studied photography in college. But at the same time, he also thought that he might also be a Spanish teacher, which probably would have been considered the more practical route for kind of a young Mexican-American.

It would certainly have been kind of the more stable route. And he even went to Mexico City in 1962 to study Spanish, to learn Spanish better. But he was drafted into the army after college, and he writes in a journal that he really just wanted to get on with his own life. He actually he was assigned work at a photography facility in Berlin.

So he actually learned more about photography in the Army. But he just wanted at that point to kind of get on with things. He decided that he was, in fact, going to be a photographer. And when he returned to Arizona, he enrolled in an MFA program at ASU. For a while, he studied with Frederic Sommer, who was this legendary photographer who was then based in Arizona.

And in 1973, he got the job of starting the photography department at Pima Community College. So he was married. He had a couple of young daughters. The family moved to Tucson in 1973, and he held that position until he had this terrible accident in 1989, one that eventually claimed his life. He was in a coma from 1989 to 1993.

He taught at Pima. He was a beloved teacher. But throughout that time he was also photographing in Tucson and eventually in other parts of the Southwest. He developed a form of photography that, on the face of things, seems fairly simple. He was going into the Tucson barrios meeting people, you know, he was gregarious, fluent in Spanish, and he simply asked people if he could photograph them.

And they were very trusting. They not only allowed him to come into their homes, often into their bedrooms, and he photographed people amidst the surroundings which they were most comfortable with. So we see, you know, a range of people younger, older and often older. I think he was also very interested in this waning traditional way of life in the barrios.

He often photographed people amidst, you know, holy pictures or small domestic shrines, Catholic shrines. And the work may seem like documentation or kind of almost have a snapshot approach, but it’s very sophisticated. He was very intentional about what he was doing, about the way that he posed people in spaces. And so we can see his work as a combination of documentation, portraiture and even staged photography.

And this is this is the way he created his art. He always wanted to be seen as an artist, and he also wanted to create work that was meaningful to Mexican-American people. And so he went all over the Southwest, sometimes photographing people out of doors, the places that people congregated. But more often than not, photographing inside people’s homes, creating this very rich record, you know, creative artistic record of the way people, Mexican-American people lived, you know, in these times and places.

 

 

Lizzy Guevara  We have a really great clip from the Center for Creative Photography’s Louis Carlos Bernal Archive, which you can find on the CCP YouTube. And this clip is called The Boy in the Barrio.

 

Carlos Louis Bernal  I think you can take the boy out of the barrio, but I don’t think you can take the barrio out of the boy. And so in terms of whether I remain as a photographer or I go on into other areas or whatever happens in my soul, I will always be a Chicano till the day I die, I will be a Chicano.

 

Gia Del Pino  I love this clip. Bernal just unabashedly takes pride in his identity as a Chicano, and I think it’s important to kind of situate what does this identity mean? And I just would like to read a passage from Louis Carlos Bernal monograph here, which was just recently published that talks about Chicanos because it is a very unique identity and has a very unique political context.

And I’m wondering perhaps we can chat about that a little bit more after this passage is read and an essay that you wrote, Elizabeth, you say the articulation of cultural and spiritual values that reflected pride in one’s race and heritage. Mecanismo was central to the movement and iconography centering on pre-Columbian deeds and culture. The Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint, and the sacred heart of Jesus, an emblem of love and compassion and popular heroes of Mexican Revolution served to link Chicanos to histories and values, apart from and well beyond the Eurocentric construct of American exceptionalism.

Moreover, nor articulations around the concept of Aztlán, the ancestral home of the Aztecs in the American Southwest, became a rallying cry for Chicanos, claiming sovereignty over colonized lands of the region. Although it does not appear that Bernal ever spoke of Aslan, the arc of his life and travels as a photographer are beginning in the border town of Douglas and extending to states throughout the Southwest and to Mexico, evokes a similar quest as search for ancestral roots for a sovereign homeland, and for a coalescence of personal and creative fulfillment.

 

 

Gia Del Pino  Bernal began to express his awakening Chicano identity as a student. At the same time, he was grappling with the development of his artistic voice. The two threads were becoming intertwined as he wrote. I have felt a great deal of anger and anxiety in my life, and I have used photography as an outlet for these frustrations. My images have always dealt with the inner battle of my soul.

I just find that passage so powerful. I’m wondering if you can speak to it.

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  Absolutely. So, you know, Bernal came to Chicanismo as a young adult. He was aware of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the protests and strikes in behalf of farmworkers in California. You know, and these protests extended throughout the Southwest. There was a lot of activity on the university campuses. Interestingly, Bernal himself was not overtly political. I don’t have any record of him taking part in protest marches, but more importantly, if you look at his photography, what he’s really interested in is bringing out the spirit and individuality of a single person.

You know, if you look at what Chicano photography meant at the beginning, it was this kind of protest photography. There’s such powerful images of these, you know, mass processions are large rallies taking place in central California, in L.A., in Phoenix. Those were not the kinds of photographs that Bernal made. He did not photograph the masses. He photographed the individual.

He only occasionally photographed farmworkers. There’s a couple of small series of work, and we have some of those photos in the show. And when he does photograph these people, it’s a very small groups and it’s individual people. And when he thinks about Chicanismo, you know, he thinks about a Chicanismo in terms of how others thought about it in terms of pride and in self, in race, in culture and heritage.

But he’s also thinking of Chicanismo very spiritually, and I think that’s what sets Bernal apart from others. He saw something very spiritual in the way that people lived. It was it was it was partially about Catholicism and the strength of Catholicism in these traditional Mexican-American communities. But it went far beyond that. It was about every single person being exceptional and about every single person being tied to the greater events in the world.

And for me, that’s sort of mystical. You know, this idea of the individual as exceptional and tied to the greater events in the world is, for me, what sets Bernal apart. There’s a mystical nature in it to me in the way that he understood the individual person, even the everyday person, as being very special and something to be deeply respected and to express that through the photograph.

 

Lizzy Guevara  I think that that is so wonderful and it really comes out in his images and in the way that he began to use color to express these ideas. Could you provide more insight into Louis Carlos Bernal’s legacy in American photography, and how do you position Bernal within the broader context of the photography canon?

 

Elizabeth Ferrar  So this is the challenging thing, right? We know that Bernal is a very important photography. In fact, Bernal knew that he was a very important photographer. You know, he was passed over for, you know, the major exhibitions, the major books when he would see, you know, white photographers of his generation get those opportunities in the 1980s. And so we have a whole legacy of photographers of color.

You know, being passed over or being overlooked in many ways, sort of being invisible. And yet they were creating this work. They were creating these major bodies of work that’s beginning to change. You know, there have been a number of, you know, major exhibitions of African-American photographers. A lot of younger photographers have younger next photographers have had exhibitions recently like Laura Aguilar and Cristina Fernandez.

And so for me, it’s really this book and this exhibition and of course, future efforts that are going to put Bernal on the map. You know, working with Aperture, publishing a major book, having such a major comprehensive exhibition, all those play a role in exposing Bernal to a greater audience. My goal ultimately is for Bernal to be seen as part of that canon of American photography.

He was a very important photographer in the second half of the 20th century. He was one of the pioneers in using color, and yet he’s never seen in that light. And so, you know, the hope is that there are future exhibitions, that his work is seen in group exhibitions, that graduate students begin to do more research. It’s nothing that happens overnight, but I certainly hope that over time Bernal’s reputation grows and he attains that position that he’s always deserved.

 

Gia Del Pino  Well, Elizabeth, this has been such a pleasure. I’m curious to know you have any last thoughts or key points to help viewers gain a better understanding of who Louis Collins Bernal was and his lasting legacy?

 

Elizabeth Ferrar Well, certainly, I hope that everybody gets a chance to look at the book and see the exhibition. The Center for Creative Photography has also put some wonderful resources online and one that has been especially valuable to me. Were the video clips to hear Bernal speak, to hear about his work from his, you know, from his own words is, is just very informative.

And so there’s a lot of resources out there now, and I hope that everybody takes advantage of them.

 

Lizzy Guevara  Thank you, Elizabeth, for your time. We’ve been so fortunate to have the opportunity to speak with you today. And we appreciate you offering all this scholarship to the field and to the public. For those interested in learning more about Louis Carlos Bernal, visit the Louis Carlos Bernard: Retrospectiva now on view until March 15, 2025. Please visit the center’s website at https://CCP.Arizona.Edu

For those interested in reading Latinx photography in the United States, a Visual History. You can visit the University of Washington Press and get your copy of Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía co-published by the Center for Creative Photography and Aperture.

 

Gia Del Pino  Yes. Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for your incredible scholarship and activism and vision. And if I just may, as a Latina in this field, your contributions have deeply impacted me and so many others who are working toward a more nuanced and accurate representation of our communities. Your work has been instrumental in ensuring our voices and creative expressions are included, recognized, and no longer misinterpreted or erased. Thank you for paving the way and offering us histories that validate our lives and our art. And I’m so grateful for this opportunity to speak with you today and look forward to continuing your work in my own way.

 

Lizzy Guevara Thank you.

 

Elizabeth Ferrar Thank you. It’s been my pleasure.

 

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe Thank you for joining Race Remix today. This episode is made possible through the generous donations of our sponsors and the efforts of our team of students, staff, faculty and community partners. If you enjoyed this conversation, listen to more episodes at https://raceremix.art.arizona.edu.