By Elias Cepeda
Extra News
CHICAGO — First he brings out boxes. Dozens of them, each with hundreds of black and white photos. Next come the framed large pieces, date-stamped, bright and each with at least two accompanying stories.

Photographer Aurelio Barrios is showing EXTRA around his storage facility, taking us through some of his favorite photos taken by his father Adalberto. Many that we view today are over sixty years old.

There’s the photo of Mexican comic king Cantinflas getting off a plane in Chicago to promote the film, Around the world in 80 days and then there’s more personal ones of him just hanging out, posing for the elder Barrios. There are the many of the most famous Mexican actor ever, Pedro Infante laughing and socializing.

There’s the one of a kind photo of Robert Kennedy wearing a sombrero, President John F. Kennedy visiting Chicago, numerous visiting Mexican Presidents, many of Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Chicago area priest known as “Father Pat,” senators, governors, and even more entertainers.

Aurelio says that though his father owned a photo studio, he also earned the trust of celebrities and power brokers by venturing outside of his studio almost every night to shoot social events, year after year. “He worked hard and was an innovator,” the son remembers.

Adalberto would take shots at an event and then touch back with those who were at the event, offering them photos at a certain price. Soon, though, he came up with a time-saving idea that allowed him to do better business.

“If he was at an event at the Palmer House or some other place like that, he’d rent a room, set it up as a dark room and have an assistant work that room. Then he’d go downstairs to the ballroom, shoot, take them up …

Finish reading Pilsen photographer Aurelio Barrios and his piece of Chicago history

LatinaLista — The power of photography can’t be underestimated. Simple pictures that show the joy, complexity, sadness of life are more powerful than words could ever convey. Photographers who have the opportunity to bring those images to life and share them with a wider audience are bound to feel pretty special.

For those who created the Los Angeles-based Las Fotos Project, that is precisely the intent.

Las Fotos Project uses photography to empower Latina youth by providing them with a creative outlet to make positive changes in their lives. Las Fotos Project collaborates with schools and organizations to develop projects that engage students’ imagination and creativity while building their confidence and self-esteem.

Founded in 2010 by Eric V. Ibarra, the goal is to create participatory photography programs for Latina youth residing in cities throughout the country with large Latino populations.

The program gives budding photographers the chance to attend workshops where they are mentored by professional photographers, given their own cameras and dispatched to click pics of their neighborhoods, special events, friends and family or everyday surroundings.

The girls’ work doesn’t just languish on a computer hard drive. Founders of Las Fotos Project have struck up partnerships with various art organizations, galleries, city events and art shows to expose the girls to various photo opportunities and, in turn, highlight their hard work and their unique perspective that they are bringing to the world through their pictures.

More information and updates on Las Fotos Project can be found on their Facebook and Twitter pages.

LatinaLista — How do you get young people to care about the national debate on immigration?

You take their picture and let them post it on Facebook!

That was the thought behind El Paso photographer David Quintanilla’s idea when he was approached by an El Paso advocacy organization called Boycott Arizona to figure out a way to get young people involved in taking a stand in the national debate. Yet, Quintanilla didn’t just want to focus on Arizona.

He wanted to created a visual campaign that raised awareness of how wrong discrimination is anywhere and everywhere. Though the original intent was to recruit young people to be part of the campaign, it wasn’t long before people of all ages wanted to be part of his unique anti-discrimination photo campaign, Boycott Hate.

Quintanilla invites people to come to his El Paso studio, dressed in white t-shirts, have their wrists shackled with pink handcuffs and allow the words “Boycott Hate” be painted on their forearms. He then takes their pictures for free, with the understanding that once they receive their pics from him, they post them on Facebook, their cell phones and any other social networking sites they belong to.

Wearing the pink handcuffs refers to Maricopa County’s infamous Sheriff Arpaio and his penchant to humiliate his prisoners by outfitting them in pink jumpsuits.

The response to Boycott Hate has been overwhelming, and the pictures powerful in their simplicity and messaging.

It just goes to show to show it doesn’t take screaming to get a message across.

LatinaLista — The old cliche that a picture speaks a thousand words is going to be put to the test in the next three weeks by ten photographers from the International League of Conservation Photographers.

Road cut through the Otay Mountain wilderness to facilitate border wall construction.
(Source: Photo by Roy Toft)
These ten, with cameras and lenses in hand, will trek across the southern border region known as the borderlands, or the U.S.-Mexico border, and document the people, places and wildlife they encounter and how immigration and border policies have been impacting the region.
Since a trip like this needs to be shared with everyone, people can (virtually) tag along on this special trip with the photographers through the pictures they post online and their daily impressions at the group’s Borderlands Rave blog site.
The trip started on Monday, January 26 and kicked off in San Diego. It will end in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
Seeing that these are professional photographers, the pictures promise to be stunning — as much for their content as for their quality.

LatinaLista — Back in 1949, two sociologists from the University of Texas, George Sanchez and Lyle Saunders, wanted to study a little documented phenomenon — the expansion of the Spanish-speaking population in Texas. The two professors wanted to investigate the “social aspects of prejudice and discrimination.” What would be uncovered would help fill the gaps in the data, as well as, educate everyone from the general public to influential bureaucrats.
The research was titled the Study of the Spanish-Speaking People of Texas. The hope of the two professors was that the study would be a documentary record showing either the improvement or lack of improvement over a ten-year period.

San Angelo gallery: A mother with her babies during a brief rest stop on their way to Wyoming from Laredo, Texas. Twenty seven persons are going straight through with only short stops enroute.
(Source: Study of the Spanish-Speaking People of Texas)
With such a broad topic, it left room for documenting every facet of Mexican-American’s lives, from how they lived to where they worked. But the major component of the study would be pictures:

Sanchez believed in the power of photographs to portray environmental conditions, social milieus, and cognitive states such as aptitude, language ability, and learning- and employment-readiness of children and adults. Sanchez shared the belief of many of his colleagues that photography was a powerful means by which to communicate important social and physical problems.

So Sanchez and Saunders hired a well known documentary photographer of the day, Russell Lee, to travel to 4 Texas cities: Corpus Christi, San Angelo, San Antonio and El Paso. Between April and July in 1949, Lee snapped hundreds of pictures of Mexican Americans capturing the “poignant, proud, exasperating, joyful, and intimate moments” of their lives.
In turn, Lee stopped time by freezing it into a visual record of over 900 images. But something odd happened — the pictures were never published in connection with the study.
Wanting to get these important images out to the public today, researchers at the University of Texas digitized all 923 photos that Russell Lee took 59 years ago and have put them up at a special site dedicated to the original study.
Each gallery of pictures is a fascinating glimpse into a past that is unfiltered or even colorized but profound simply because it is.

LatinaLista — Whoever coined the old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” never imagined a haunting photo exhibit as the one titled Ausencias. Otherwise, the saying would have been “A picture is worth a thousand words unsaid — and more.”
There are few times in our lives when we can sincerely say that we are touched by a photograph of strangers but in an exhibit that started last year in Europe and this fall is winding its way through Latin America, Ausencias is leaving art patrons speechless.

Ausencias chronicles a small part of the “forced disappearances” of over 30,000 Argentinians between 1976 and 1983 by the Argentine military dictatorship. The brainchild of photographer Gustavo Germano pairs decades old photos with new ones — the photos are the same: same location, same people, same poses, with one exception — there is someone missing in every modern-day photo. They are the ones who disappeared at the hands of the military junta in power at the time.
The pictures are riveting knowing that the missing people were never to have been seen again. They were young people: sons, daughters, parents themselves, novios, etc. To this day, family members in Argentina wonder where the bodies of their loved ones are. These people have become known as “Los Desaparecidos.”

Laura with her parents in 1976. In 2006, Laura alone.
(Source: Ausencia exhibit)

The exhibit highlights an era in Argentine history that needs to be remembered and through Ausencias, it is.
Since the exhibit doesn’t currently have any U.S. dates, the following YouTube video gives a small glimpse of what the exhibit is like and we can hear in Gustavo’s own words (in Spanish) his reasons and feelings for creating Ausencia.