Delilah Montoya, a Chicana artist based in Albuquerque, turns a mestizaje lens on documentary photography and the representation of women.
Sitting together in her studio at Sanitary Tortilla Factory in Albuquerque, surrounded by her photographs, books, and ephemera of political and community organizing, Delilah Montoya tells me, “One thing about being a Chicana artist: we’re conscious of how our histories were broken. I’ve been thinking about these things since I was sixteen years old.”
That day, Montoya was installing Divine Immanence, an exhibition with local artist Apolo Gomez, in STF’s gallery. The show included her photo mural La Llorona in Lillith’s Gardens, which reimagines the archetypal “bad girls.” She takes a similar approach in all her work, using photography to counter dominant aesthetics and narratives of representation. An accomplished artist and educator, Montoya’s work has held the attention of art historians and scholars and is in the collections of the Smithsonian Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Bronx Museum, and more.
“I always felt like there was something that was innately askew [in documentary photography]… more about sensationalism and being a voyeur, and I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be a platform so that those I’m working with have a way of speaking,” she said. “I think it makes more sense to become a good listener. And I think that does more to reveal.”
I think it makes more sense to become a good listener. And I think that does more to reveal.
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1955, Montoya’s ancestral roots are in New Mexico, and a mestizaje perspective informs her work. For example, her 1992 Codex Delilah, Six-Deer: Journey from Mexicatl to Chicana charts a transcendent evolution of women in the folklore tradition. Originally created for The Chicano Codices: Encountering Art of the Americas at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, and created in collaboration with Cecilio García-Camarillo, the piece was recently on view at the Albuquerque Museum for Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche in summer 2022. The codex features important, though often ignored, women of history.
“When something cataclysmic was coming down, like the collapse of a civilization, the women were active,” said Montoya, whose codex includes ancient and modern crises, including nuclear production in New Mexico. “But history never reflects that.”
In 1999, Montoya completed Guadalupe Tattoos, again using photography to show how dominant narratives about women are imprinted and perpetuated. “Let’s face it,” she said, “the Virgin Mary is kind of an impossible position. But that’s the standard, right?”
The artist took things one step further in her 2006 book Women Boxers: The New Warriors. “I wanted to photograph female boxers because I thought it was a good way to play with the idea of the malcriada and bring it to real life through a contemporary woman: the female boxer,” she said. “On one hand, you have the feminists telling them ‘What are you doing hitting each other?’ On the other hand, men are telling them, ‘How dare you, this is our thing!’”
Another impossible position.
Montoya learned how to pull focus on her manual camera and adjust exposure quickly while shooting for Nebraska’s Waterloo Weekly Gazette in the 1970s, a skillset that served her well near the boxing ring since she was shooting medium-format film. The other photographers, all male, had digital cameras. “They’re thinking, this lady knows nothing,” she said. “And I just keep showing up for the fights, practice, everything.”
Showing up has numerous meanings in Montoya’s work.
Her series Sed: Trail of Thirst, another collaboration, this time with Orlando Lara for Houston’s 2004 FotoFest, looked at an area on the Tohono O’odham Reservation along the U.S.-Mexico border where, at the time, deaths were at the highest rate and where there was heavy trafficking.
“I was listening to Amalia Mesa-Bains, and she talked about how the land was scarred and how the land has a memory. So when I looked out on the land, I began to realize—there’re the scars, there’re the memories. We just have to look at the land and we know, we understand the crossing.”
While the photographs include markers of activity and trauma, Montoya emptied the images of people, instead only depicting their shadows.
Her recent body of work, Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra Calidad, turns a contemporary lens on the Spanish colonial casta paintings that aimed to codify race. For the project, she wanted to find people with colonial heritage who have been in the Americas and the United States for generations “who could think about themselves as being colonial.” Montoya digitally composed scenes of family meals, church services, and other gatherings, producing a staged effect as a nod to casta paintings and the still life genre. Each photograph also includes family members’ DNA results. The photos were recently included in Xican–a.o.x. Body at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum.
“Where is the history? Who indulged it? Who looks?” Montoya asked. “I wanted to find out how we are being defined and how we define our own identities… So what is true? If we document ourselves through documentary photography using those aesthetics, is there a redefinition? I don’t know.”
As I left her studio, Montoya mentioned some new work in process: photographs of clouds. Again, she uses her camera to picture the shape-shifting of identity, depending on who’s doing the looking.
