Finding Their Voice Behind the Lens

The first time 18-year-old Alejandra Martinez was moved to tears by art was when she visited the Getty Museum exhibition María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold. “I had never felt so connected to artwork before,” she says.

Her favorite piece in the show was Campos-Pons’s Red Composition, a triptych of photographs that evokes themes of confusion, prayer, and clearing paths to move forward. Martinez liked it so much that she included it in a presentation for her English class at UCLA as an example of how artwork shows empathy.

There was much to admire (and learn) from Campos-Pons's artwork that day. Martinez explored the exhibition as part of a four-month workshop hosted by Las Fotos Project, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit whose mission is to elevate the voices of young women and gender-expansive youth from communities of color through photography. Campos-Pons and her Getty show served as the inspiration for the course, which was developed specifically for participants who had already learned the basics of photography and saw art as part of their long-term career goals.

Campos-Pons’s work spans photography, audiovisual media, painting, and installation, and interrogates themes such as migration, home, and intergenerational trauma and resilience—themes Martinez and her fellow students, all of whom come from families of immigrants, feel deeply and already explore in their own art practice. The Las Fotos course, then, served as a powerful affirmation of their right to pursue their art.

“Campos-Pons’s practice feels so expansive and so interdisciplinary that it’s been a great way for the students to grant themselves permission to see that there’s another artist of color who is doing this and doing it on her own terms and still being embraced,” says Arlene Mejorado, the class’s teacher. “That’s really, really valuable for the students.”

Finding a voice through Las Fotos

Stroll the bustling hub of restaurants and shops on East Cesar Chavez Avenue in Boyle Heights, and you’ll find the bright pink facade of Las Fotos Project. Inside, tables and chairs are arranged in a collaborative U shape, while smaller rooms down the hall serve as office space, storage for supplies, and a studio to practice photography skills. Framed portraits of mothers, brothers, grandmothers, and other individuals line the walls, the labels providing insight into the photographers’ memories of their families and childhoods.

Las Fotos was founded in 2010 by photographer Eric V. Ibarra to support teenage girls throughout LA in building a skill that could also help boost their confidence and self-esteem. Students mostly come from South, Central, and East LA, and no experience or even possession of a camera is necessary. Young people gather for classes like Esta Soy Yo (This Is Me) and Digital Promotoras (Digital Promotors), which teach participants photography skills while also helping them find their voice as artists and raise awareness about social issues. The Creative Entrepreneurship Opportunities course gives students the chance to collaborate with brands like the Angel City Football Club as photographers. Las Fotos also frequently collaborates with local museums, galleries, and artists to show students a broad representation of the LA art scene.

Until recently, Las Fotos Project’s programs were only open to students aged 13 through 18. But many who had graduated wanted to continue working with Las Fotos to hone their practice. “They’re really hungry to pursue art as a career and talk to us about getting there with scholarships and/or internships,” says Las Fotos photo education manager Diego Torres-Casso.

Torres-Casso and fellow Las Fotos staff were thinking of creating an independent study program for students aged 18 through 24 when Getty Museum community engagement coordinator Christian Morales reached out about collaborating with Las Fotos on an initiative designed around Campos-Pons (her exhibition was on view at the Getty Center from February 18 through May 4, 2025).

“It’s awesome to be able to bring in this artist and her references, like, if you’re interested in talking about motherhood, if you’re interested in talking about labor, if you’re interested in talking about lineage and family history and diaspora, this is the artist who has already done all of this work,” Torres-Casso says.

Class is in session

The nine enrollees in the course (most of whom are studying art in college) met every Saturday. Mejorado led them in crafting artist statements, bios, and a portfolio of their work—materials they can present to curators or galleries or use for other professional opportunities. “Sometimes people don’t put those pieces together until they’re in an MFA program,” Mejorado notes. Participants visited galleries around LA, took part in workshops about advanced photography processes like creating cyanotype negatives, and studied artists who practice photography alongside other mediums, like Campos-Pons.

Students were also tasked with developing their own projects inspired by the themes and art they learned about in the course. Several sessions were devoted to working on these ideas and critiquing the work of classmates.

“Something that we’ve been emphasizing in the class is, don’t decide your medium. First, decide your message,” Mejorado says. “Think about what you want to say, and then think about what you need to do to get there, versus, ‘I’m going to make photography,’ and then, ‘What am I going to make a photograph about?’ So, that’s in the spirit of Campos-Pons.”

Students also made a few visits to the Getty Center to see the Campos-Pons exhibition and meet with Getty Museum staff to learn about various art-adjacent career paths such as curation, photo conservation, and digitization.

The highlight of the class? Meeting Campos-Pons herself. After attending her performance at the Getty Center (a collaboration with musician Kamaal Malak that wove sound, movement, and ritual to reflect on loss and regeneration, especially in light of the LA fires), the class gathered with Campos-Pons for a brief chat. Students posed questions, and Campos-Pons gave them her advice as an artist and asked them about their backgrounds. Perhaps most delightful of all for the students, Campos-Pons conducted the discussion in Spanish. Speaking in their native language made the whole experience feel more intimate and authentic, notes student Eztli De Jesus.

“I think for an artist to make time to talk to people who are working in response to her work is really special. It meant a lot that she took even just a couple of minutes of her time to talk to us,” De Jesus says.

Empowering younger generations is part of Campos-Pons’s ethos, explains associate curator of photographs Mazie Harris, who was the exhibition’s curator. “At first, I thought her interest in working with the younger generation was just part of her overall sort of generosity. But then I realized the word isn’t really like ‘teaching.’ It’s more of a two-way street,” Harris says.

“‘Teaching’ suggests someone who knows something and then imparts it to other people. But I think for her, it’s really a conversation. She’s getting as much from them as she’s giving.”

“I now get to explain what I’ve been wanting to explain”

In between field trips and lessons, the students worked to develop their own projects, empowered by the confidence they’ve gotten through Las Fotos and the example Campos-Pons set as an artist. Their work will be shown in a special exhibition at Altura Los Ángeles gallery in Lincoln Heights beginning June 27, 2025, with an opening reception from 6–9pm.

De Jesus first came to Las Fotos at the suggestion of her mom. “It was during quarantine, and I wasn’t doing anything, and she was kind of like, ‘You need a hobby—you can’t just spend all your time in your room,’” De Jesus admits. She had never picked up a camera before. Now, she’s hoping to transfer to USC to study journalism. Her project will involve images paired with interviews that ask the subjects to share how they think they are perceived by other people.

Campos-Pons’s work, and De Jesus’s experience with Las Fotos, has helped her learn to be “messy” with her efforts, she says.

“When I first started photography, I never thought, ‘I want to try that’ or ‘I can do that.’” But now, I’m just a lot more motivated to get out of my comfort zone and ask more questions, like question reality, or question why things are the way that they are in our world,” she says. “Moving forward, I’m definitely going to explore those things and push myself to try new things and have more conversations with other creatives and more discussions about identity and culture.”

Julie Rebollar, an incoming freshman at UC Berkeley, joined Las Fotos with some photography experience from using her mom’s digital camera from the 2000s. But at Las Fotos, she’s learned how to take pictures that tell a story. She signed up for the Campos-Pons course because the artist’s themes of labor, immigration, and family echoed the ideas Rebollar wanted to explore in her own work. The class inspired her to focus her project on her grandmother, whom she had never met, and her mom. She plans to shoot in black and white, on film, in the Las Fotos studio—all of which she’ll be doing for the first time.

For Rebollar, the class deepened her appreciation of art and taught her to value other artists’ perspectives. “There’s a lot of thought that goes into creating art, and I feel like now when I’m visiting an exhibition, I try to forget about myself and try to see it from the artist’s own perspective and the passion that they made their work with,” Rebollar says.

Some students, like Martinez, join Las Fotos already identifying as artists. Her first creative outlet as a young teen was painting; she signed up for Las Fotos Project’s programs to learn more about photography, which she views as a more viable career option. For her project, she’s creating a series of prints using negatives she found in a drawer in her late grandmother’s house. The images capture her grandmother’s life in the 1980s in Mexico, before she immigrated to the US—family dinners that look lively enough to be parties, her father as a young boy, relatives chatting in the kitchen.

Going through the 500 negatives and traveling to Mexico, to the home where the photos were taken, helped Martinez grieve the loss of her grandmother and understand her family a little bit better. Her time in the Las Fotos program has given her the space and encouragement to explore that experience through art.

“Even now, my family feels uncomfortable being in the US, especially with everything that’s happening [politically]. I realized that in all these pictures she is the happiest, and she’s the most herself, and so is my dad,” Martinez says. “Even though the US is what they call home, no matter what, they always want to go back. Their life is over there; their hearts are over there.”

“I think Las Fotos has helped me through all of that,” she adds. “I now get to explain what I’ve been wanting to explain and why it’s important.”

Visit Las Fotos Project to find out more about their programs and how to support their mission.