Elizabeth Ferrer Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía

Elizabeth Ferrer
Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografia

Notes

Join us in the R&D Store for an in-depth look at a pioneering Chicano photographer who preserves the legacy of his southwestern community. Louis Carlos Bernal was photographed in the wake of the 1970s US Civil Rights era and documented the barrio communites of the southwest throughout the 1980s. For Bernal, photography was a potent tool in affirming the value of individuals and communities who lacked visibility and agency. Bernal's work resonates with Catholicism, Indigenous beliefs, and popular practices tied to the land. Often photographing the interiors of homes and their inhabitants, his subjects are surrounded by the objects they lived with — framed portraits of family members, religious pictures and statuaries, small shrines festooned with flowers, and elements of contemporary popular culture. Bernal viewed these spaces as rich with personal, cultural, and spiritual meaning, and his unforgettable photographs express a vision of la vida cotidiana — everyday life — as a state of grace.

Elizabeth Ferrer is a writer, arts activist and curator of the traveling exhibition of Bernal's work now on view at The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. She is the former vice president of contemporary art at BRIC in Brooklyn and the author of Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History (2021). She presents an in-depth look at the landmark work featured in the exhibition and just-published Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía (Aperture).