Biography

I was born in Southern California, and in my early adulthood was engaged in travel and studies that ranged from dance and film to literature and bookbinding. I began practicing photography in 1995 at City College in San Francisco, understanding almost immediately that I had found my life’s work. I began working with the 8x10 view camera in the summer of 1997 and at the same time moved to El Rito, New Mexico to work with Walter Chappell, who guided me in printmaking and camerawork over the next three years.

While most of my work is comprised of 8x10 contact prints, I do make use of smaller cameras, making both contact prints and enlargements from these negatives.

My early work was focused on portraiture, an area of study which gradually enlarged to include the landscape and still life. Of great importance have been two journeys to Southeast Asia, the first in 2002, visiting five countries over three months, accompanied by my 8x10 camera.

My involvement with plants and gardening is a continuing thread in my work. Currently I am engaged in a project around tree peonies, and have recently returned from a journey to photograph these plants in upstate New York.

My photographs have appeared in publications since 1997, including articles in View Camera and most recently Sojourns, and have been exhibited since 2001.

I live in Berkeley, California.

Artist Statement

I discovered photography in my early childhood through looking at old family portraits. The impressions of these black and white images, of people related and dear to me, are the most enduring influence on the work I have made. These photographs also suggested something mysterious, and I recognize now that my real interest lay in experiencing a world that was different from the one I saw with my ordinary sight.

I am drawn to photograph what is familiar to me, the people and things of home. This is a way of honoring and an effort to see these things as they really are. Yet from my earliest photographs I was offered much more. There is much that appears in these images that I did not recognize at all. I experience with my pictures something I call strangeness and it lingers in me. It is a feeling that I am courting something invisible, certainly beyond my ordinary eyes. The camera opens a door inside me through which I can observe the world; often it is the camera itself that reveals the world to me. My first photographs were portraits and I called them paintings of the interior. I feel that all of my work, no matter the subject, is oriented toward this sense of portraiture. I am guided by my intuition that it is possible to make the inner life visible. This is truly the necessity in my work--finding a way to pursue a relationship between my own nature and the nature of Reality. Only by engaging my energies in this pursuit does my life have gravity. I do not separate my aims for understanding from my photographic work. This work provides the means and materials for me to confront my life and find meaning. Yet making images alone would be in vain if it did not connect me to my love, if it did not connect me to the world of people and feeling.

There are many layers of experience that become fulfilled in a picture. The disparate parts of life eventually blend and harmonize, but this takes time and my growth is slow. It is seldom a matter of choice how a subject presents itself. I would be neglecting something true if I did not acknowledge that for as difficult as the situation of the world is, I still find it beautiful. And beauty is present even in the darkest of places. My life’s circumstances have been gifts, and the people and places I photograph are often now not familiar. Water has become a dear subject for me and an expression of the flow and change in life. Time passes, things pass and nothing is ever repeated whether it is a pattern etched in the river or the expression on a face. Making pictures is not a matter of nostalgia however; it is an affirmation of faith. To make pictures requires an effort to be in the present. Seeing the flow of impressions like a river, I become aware of the possibility of stepping in to touch the water. The photographs are made by entering this current and arresting a moment in the flow of time.

It is through the making and viewing of the fully realized print that much of this work is reconciled and wordless meaning emerges. Printmaking encourages the refinement of feeling. There are spiritual values contained in the gray scale. It is a potentially long scale and when used intentionally, becomes a vehicle of transmission. Black and white describe only the two absolutes of silver photography, where there is complete absence of detail. It is between the poles of darkness and lightness that forms emerge and our lives acquire substance.

To see Elvira's images in our online gallery, click here.

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