In Conversation with Elias and Damarys is a look into important topics around photography like: the nature of truth, photographic responsibilities, social media culture, and history. Join us as Elias, Damarys, and Armando share their thoughts and experiences as photographers in South Florida.
Pérez Art Museum Miami: Hello and welcome to In Conversation by Pamm EDU. I’m Armando Zamora, Digital and Interpretive Content Coordinator and your host. This program is meant to go alongside other educational materials the museum offers. However, instead of talking about the art on the walls, we’ll be talking to community members with differing backgrounds about the issues the art aims to tackle with a specific focus on Miami and South Florida. This episode is inspired by the work in the exhibition, Language and Image. The exhibition features over 100 photographic works from the museum’s permanent collection.
PAMM: My guests today are:
Elias Rishmawi: Elias Rishmawi.
Damarys Alvarez: Damarys Alvarez.
PAMM: So I wanted to start by asking you guys to give us a quick shpiel about yourselves, your name, a little bit about your practice, fun facts about yourself, etc. Either one of you can start.
Elias Rishmawi: Do you want to start?
Damarys Alvarez: Sure. My name is Damarys Alvarez. Relationship with Miami and photography. How do I even start? Well, I all started with my obsession with Bunny Eager, being a photographer back in the Golden Age in the 50s, capturing early photographs of Betty Page. And in the time that I met Elias in MDC, I was always in the time it was called Androgyny. I was fixated by identity and sexuality and finding a similar confidence where you see in a center full or in a pin-up. And it was kind of this embracing skin that I was just so memorialized trying to capture that and trying to create setups and going to different parts of Florida, going to Homestead and bringing a backdrop and my own lights and fabrics and making these elaborate scenes that were just to give a spotlight to someone that was probably either transitioning or finding their voice through clothing that they feel really great in. And I don’t know, that kind of evolved into going to New York and learning from there. But when being in a place like Parsons, I felt very like the first time, a minority, even though I came out of a place that everyone’s Cuban, I was the only Cuban in classes. And as a woman too, a Latina artist, in that time of practice, I would look a lot like, it went from Cindy Sherman and loving her to then really looking and idolizing people like Anna Mendieta who left as an orphan from Cuba and thought her own identity crisis and finding what sense of home was and what it meant. And especially that project of Silhouette as it really like stemmed from me as like, oh, she’s a feminist, it’s great, but she’s a Latina too. And so that I felt like it was finally like I relate with her, whereas like someone like Bunny Yeager, as much as I love her, she’s just like a white woman photographer that had a money to get all this material. And whereas Anna Mendieta used out of nothing just dirt or elements of earth to create the works that she did. And I don’t know, through that chapter, I met a lot of Latin punks in New York and that helped me find a voice and telling me like, okay, my mom’s a refugee, my dad’s an exile, but I don’t know what this means to be an American. And like those questions of identity were like always like, niakini, I’m not from here, I’m not from there, but how am I here? And that evolved to like, going myself to Cuba and meeting with punks out in Cuba and doing a portrait project on punks in Lacaiz. Now a little bit about myself, fast forward, photograph a lot of like Fetish Factory and finding that exploration of like the secret media STEM culture that’s really safe and really supportive and on the side, you know, helping promote more like this South Florida alternative goth scene, which is Hex Miami and we don’t have much of that here. So yeah. I know you have a lot of great stuff to talk about too, and your background.
Elias Rishmawi: Okay, so I think for me photography, I got into photography at a very early age because my grandparents had the first developing lab in the south of Chile. And I grew up with the smells of all of that and growing up with the printing and my mom was also a photographer, I think for me, I was just very inspired by all of that and also archival material. When I was younger, I was fascinated by seeing photos of my ancestors and question like how do we have these images and also like thinking past a photograph, just a frame but like thinking of like photographs in boxes, how we archive a lot of our photographs in boxes as well. And I think for me, when you first met me, Damarys, it was very cinematic work and I was thinking very much like movie and I wanted to do film, etc. But then I just went away from that. And for some reason, I just my family were like, you need to start archiving our photographs and I just learned to love it and now it’s expanded into that. Yeah, I don’t know what else to say.
Damarys Alvarez: I feel like adding to Elias’ story, I remember being like, I looked up to their work and I’m like, the lighting is so amazing. It feels like I paused the film and I feel like that same light that you’re trying to capture when we were first early little college heads in MDC, now your family and your culture is that same spotlight. That same cinema essence.
Elias Rishmawi: And it’s the same thing that you were saying as well, too. We both started with I guess this specific language of photography. But then when we got to go to New York, we’re like, oh no, like this is not it.
Damarys Alvarez: Yeah.
Elias Rishmawi: We’re going to question all of it.
Damarys Alvarez: Yeah.
Elias Rishmawi: And then, I also, I feel like, at least for me, growing up here in Miami, it was always like going like people are always trying to push me against my roots and go like the more American way, you know, and I think, yeah, growing up here, Miami kind of puts you in that bubble sometimes.
Damarys Alvarez: Yeah, Miami is definitely a whitewash culture. It’s like you strive to be a Carmen. Carmen is for me, it’s like saying Karen, but you’re Carmen but you’re from Spain. That to me is a Carmen and I would be frustrating, especially when I used to work in this place. I would have to serve people in brunch and they’ll be like very entitled and I’m like, oh, yeah, you’re Cuban, right? And I’m like, no, I’m Spaniard. It’s like, what’s the sentence of entitlement? Like, you’re both, you’re everything. And you can’t really act like you’re from just this one place. That’s like a colonizer concept and embrace instead a little bit of everything. But because we live in a red state like this, it’s I guess, it’s more accepted to be white and whitewash than embracing everything else. And I feel like, yeah, it’s like our fight to be like, no, let’s archive, let’s research, let’s see where what makes all of us really unique. Yeah.
PAMM: Learning to accept ourselves.
Damarys Alvarez: Yeah. And it’s an ongoing process. That’s like a lifelong, we’re students forever. So we’re always going to be growing.
Elias Rishmawi: 1000%. I’m growing right now.
PAMM: There was something you just said that leads to the second question that I had to give you guys. And that’s, to you, what is a photograph?
