Marcus Chormicle is an art photographer — his work has been shown in galleries throughout the Southwest. But he didn’t start out that way.
As a photojournalism student at Arizona State University, he spent years honing a revealing, personal style of photography that captured the lived experience of people and places.
As he got older though, he realized he wasn’t that interested in other people and other places — he wanted to turn the lens on his people and his ancestral home.
Chormicle joined The Show to talk about his work.
Full conversation
MARCUS CHORMICLE: My perspective on art making is that you're always looking to express something internal, in an external way. And so I wanted to elaborate on my internal state, my lived experience. So, I began coming back home to Las Cruces, where I grew up in order to photograph my own family as a way of kind of getting to the root of some internal states of being.
I was still working in the kind of documentary style that was not too dissimilar from what I was doing in journalism, but by exploring these things that had such close relation to my own self, I was able to kind of express that a little bit more.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, I'm really interested in this because it seems like what you're saying, if I'm understanding correctly, is wanting to bring the style of documentary to work where you were not an objective observer.
CHORMICLE: Correct, yeah, and photography's power comes from this value that is made when the artist makes the decision to take a photograph. You're deciding what to include in the frame and tell folks, “This is significant, it's worth looking at and thinking about and considering.”
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, one of the reasons I'm curious to ask you about these kind of philosophical underpinnings, I know that an issue that you have wrestled with in one of your early projects, which was called “Still Playing with Fire”, which really confronted the deaths of three people who were very meaningful to you.
When you showed these images, as I've heard you say, “Most of the people in the family were receptive”, but not all the people in your life were receptive. Can you tell me what that experience was like?
CHORMICLE: Yeah I think that project “Still Playing with Fire” is about a lot of the dysfunction within my own family and connecting the root of those things to the colonial legacy of the New Mexico territories and bringing into focus the contemporary ways that people of Indigenous or Chicano heritage in the New Mexico territories of what is now the United States are contending with those things.
And so, yeah, I've been put into situations where family members don't realize that they're no longer happy with the photos and it's kind of blown up at times in ways and I think that that's part of making work that kind of hits at a certain point.
DINGMAN: Absolutely, but it also strikes me as a noteworthy departure from your journalistic training because there is this idea in journalism that the work that comes from interaction with sources is not then editorially approved by those sources, but you're talking about trying to tell an important public facing story, but also trying to do that in a way that doesn't interfere with the lives of of the people who are part of that story.
CHORMICLE: I think that a lot of that has to do with the person who's making the statement, so the photographer, the journalist the artist, and their place in the community that they're making work. It's really easy to not have as many dilemmas if you aren't connected or part of the community that you're making work about and when you are, it comes with a different level of accountability.
You know, my work's about my family and what my family's experienced and it's real life, it's lived experience, it's not just abstract, it's seeing your own experience of the world reflected to you, that is hard.
DINGMAN: Well, let's talk then about the transition between the “Still Playing with Fire” project and this new work, “Say Uncle”, which is about trying to make work that does not necessarily emanate from a place of tragedy.
CHORMICLE: Yeah, for me, that is in the process. I think that with “Say Uncle” I'm still addressing the colonial legacy of photography, of representation of Séc-he, the place where my family is from.
DINGMAN: If I understand correctly, this came out of these walks that you would take around this area with your uncle. Do you feel like you were seeing it through different eyes?
CHORMICLE: A lot of it comes from responding to stories he's told me, while on those walks or outside of the walks and hearing about his connection, about my other family's connections to these places, there on the land where my family, my ancestors or our relatives have stood for time immemorial. And so that connection is what I'm seeing and for myself and also imagining what he had seen, my uncle, and what all of our family and ancestors have seen.
Hearing their mostly positive stories about being in that space and appreciating how special it is to have a connection to a place that goes back as many generations as there have ever been, and being able to appreciate that continuity.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, so how much do you think about as an artist, a non-indigenous person, generally speaking, is not gonna see the same history that you are able to see by virtue of your relationship to the land. Do you feel any pressure to explain that?
CHORMICLE: I am trying to address, directly address other native folks first, and beyond that, anyone else who appreciates the work, that's kind of icing on the cake at that point. I like the idea of there being different interpretations of it and people having different access points to it.
I think healthy culture has entry points and exit points and I think that that's kind of a special thing about looking at other artists when you identify with them, is you can kind of guess what's in their head and the closer you are to seeing yourself in them, maybe the more rich that's going to be.
DINGMAN: Yeah. So how much do those ideas that you were just expressing inform this first public showing of the work, which is going to happen on March 7, and it's gonna be on your uncle's allotment on the reservation where some of the photographs were taken.
CHORMICLE: Yeah, I think that the opportunity to make work with my own family on our shared ancestral homeland and then show it there, independent of Institutions or or anything other than our own agency, is really significant. It's something that only native people in this continent have the ability to do. I, of course, have the desire to share it more broadly.
DINGMAN: Well, and to be clear, the exhibition is open to anyone who wants to come. It's just that you're giving primacy to a certain audience by virtue of the location you've selected of where it's being shown.
CHORMICLE: Correct. And the secondary audience, if you find your own connection in it, it’s quite a great privilege and I've had that experience with a lot of artists who represent communities that I'm not a part of and I want to speak directly to my family and my relatives in that way.
