Culture & Community | Education & Youth | Photography | Arts & Culture
Alex S. Fuentes, A Colossal Span and Transcendent Incandescent. Lucy Gellman Photos.
It started with a miniature Polaroid camera and a trip to the White Mountains.
Back then, Alex Fuentes had never heard of the photographer Bill Jacobsen, or played with the warm, haloed shapes that linger around a beam of light. But when her mother handed her a camera, its body almost weightless in her hand, she snapped a photo and was instantly hooked.
Fuentes, who is now a rising junior at James Hillhouse High School, is one of the creative young minds behind Evolution, an exhibition from Wábi Gallery’s FOCUS Fellows that closed Sunday at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art (ECoCA). The work of 11 fellows between middle and high school, it shows in real time the rich, textured and often unflinching stories young people have to tell, if they are just given the tools and the time to tell them.
The fellowship program is led by Wábi founder and director Kim Weston, a photographer whose own work and experience has pushed her to diversify arts education for young people in the field. Since launching in October 2021, the fellowship has grown to include over two dozen students, some of whom return year after year.
Top: Wábi Gallery founder and director Kim Weston. Bottom: Tywain (Ty) Harris talks about his work with ECoCA attendee Mindi Englart.
This year, they include Mason Booker, Nicholas Clement, Jaylin Ambrose Cooper, Bethany Edwards, Alex Scarlet Fuentes, Tywain Harris, Snigtha Mohanraj, Abril Rosario, Nikolas E. Santaella, Wes Weston and Brayden Zawadowski.
“Photography is not just art,” Weston said on a recent walkthrough of the show. “It’s a way that we heal. It’s that isolation that we take on when we go out into the world to do something every day. To take a moment to stop, pause, and then take a picture. We see photography every day when we open our eyes … but it’s something special to be able to stop for a moment and observe the beauty around you.”
It’s how that vision emerges, from Booker’s color-drenched street scenes to Tywain Harris’ close, sometimes surreal and uncanny portraits, that keeps a viewer coming back.
Take, for instance, work by Fuentes, whose interest in photography bloomed out of a trip to Mount Washington and the gift of a Polaroid four years ago. On a recent summer night, she stood with her mother, Nicole Sanchez, taking in months of work inspired by the Connecticut-based photographer Bill Jacobsen. On the wall in front of them, rows and rows of photographs gave off bright , honeyed bursts of color, until it seemed that they were emitting light themselves.
In one, titled Evening Dine, the artist pictured a dinner table draped in white and lined with glowing candles, the focus so soft they seemed to melt into each other as they danced over the dinnerware. In another, titled Transcendent Incandescent, Fuentes revealed surprising corners of Ely Center itself, photographing the red and purple glow of windows in Ashton Phillips’ Prey Drive before the show came down earlier this year Another, and she turned her lens on the Q Bridge, transforming it into an otherworldly, distorted object with A Colossal Span.
“I found a lot of confidence, I found a lot of grounding [in the program],” she said. While photography has been an interest of hers for years, it was the FOCUS fellowship that helped her learn about and try her hand at different styles (she still loves a Polaroid, but now shoots with an Olympus OM-D E-M10).
Top: Alex Fuentes with her mom, Nicole Sanchez. Bottom: Work from Nickolas E. Santaella.
Her interest in Jacobsen’s work specifically, known for its soft focus and diffused, smear-like quality of light, was just one lesson that stuck. During the fellowship, Fuentes was excited for the weekly sessions, during which students learned about photographers including Lorna Simpson, Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, Dread Scott, Sally Mann, Leslie Hewitt, Catherine Opie, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Alec Soth, Priya Kambli and Nona Faustine.
She savored learning from not just Weston, but also photographers like Lotta Studio’s Mistina Hanscom and East Rock-based Bud Glick, whose documentary photography contains decades of history from New York’s Chinatown to the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Along the way, Sanchez said, she could see a transformation not only in her daughter’s work, but also in her daughter herself.
“It feels great,” she said. “It feels like she can have an outlet to express herself.”
That shift in perspective—as a kind of portal to whole layers of self-discovery—is also very present in the work of Nickolas E. Santaella, a recent graduate of Wilbur Cross High School who plans to work as an EMT (he is among a handful of Cross students who pursue EMS certification each year, through a special program that the school offers).
Work by Nickolas E. Santaella.
Even before the FOCUS fellowship, Santaella was interested in photography, using a trusty Nikon D 7000 that a friend in the “Royal Rangers” (a group that is like the boy scouts, but for Jesus Christ, he explained) gifted him several years ago. But the program gave him a rare and unexpected gift: a new way of processing the world around him, thanks to photographers that he had never heard of before.
In his portfolio, Santaella has taken on the full scope of Wábi’s teaching: dramatic, Arbus-esque portraits, experiments with artificial and natural light, sharp architectural shots saturated with color, close-cropped profiles (including one of FOCUS fellow Abril Rosario) that seem to glow.
Among the most moving pieces are those that pay homage to his late mother, Diana Santaella. Born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico in 1972, Diana was luminous, gentle and endlessly kind with a bright, easy smile, Santaella remembered. At home, she was a doting mom and devoted partner to Nikolas’ dad, Luis Santaella, who is another frequent presence in his photography.
At Star of Jacob Church in the Hill, she was involved in praise and worship, with a steadfast faith that she passed down to her only son. Seven years ago, she died during a Lupus flare that landed her in the hospital. In the years since, Santaella said, his faith has helped carry him through.
Nickolas E. Santaella, Absent.
“Pieces like this feel very dear to me,” he said, gesturing to a gallery wall where his work stretched out, each photograph with just enough room to breathe. At the upper right, two images of his mom, both with him as an infant, looked back.
In his photograph Mother & Son, framed as an image within an image, the tenderness is almost too much to bear. In an old photo at the center of the work, Diana holds an infant Santaella, who can’t be more than a few months old. He lifts a pudgy, small palm to her chin, fingers stopping just underneath her bottom lip. He has those perfect baby rolls of fat on his little arms and wrists. Diana looks out to the viewer, the hint of a smile crossing her mouth.
Around the first image, the scene gets even more conceptually interesting: Santaella has placed the photograph on the ground, where asphalt, cement and a spray of weeds all meet each other. The weeds include short grass and dandelion greens that are not yet in bloom, a shock of green against the asphalt. It is, for this fleeting moment, as if she sits at the juncture of that which is resiliently, hardily, vibrantly alive, and that which was once alive, and has been paved over.
Nickolas E. Santaella, Life and Loss.
In a second, entitled Life and Loss and inspired by Kambli’s layered collages, Santaella has built on a photo of himself as a newborn, cradled in his mother’s arms as she faces out toward the viewer. Behind her, the familiar infrastructure of a hospital room comes into focus: the adjustable bed, a light switch on the vinyl paneling, two disposable drinking cups nested inside each other. She is freshly postpartum, a swaddled baby Santaella asleep on the white trim of her nightgown.
But where her eyes would otherwise be, a triangle of white slices through the grayscale, scribbled with a set of cartoon eyes and thick, bushy black brows. In each eye, there’s a lopsided X—as if the shapes belong to a cartoon character who has been knocked out. The juxtaposition, installed just above a portrait of Santaella’s father, is jarring: two-thirds of the photograph teems with life, while a third rejects it entirely. If a viewer is unmoored, that’s part of the point: it mirrors the long, destabilizing and sometimes abrupt trajectory that grief can be.
When he started the fellowship program last year, Santaella was already interested in documenting the city around him, he said. But learning about new photographers, including those who too often went untaught, helped him broaden his practice.
Top: Work by Jaylin Ambrose Cooper. Bottom: Mason Booker checks out Alex Fuentes' work.
Like many students in the program, he gravitated toward the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose intimate, textured portraits of family spoke to him. But his work reflects the breadth of the fellowship, from Jacobsen’s soft, dancing take on light to Tommi Vitalla’s shadow photography to portraiture that echoes of Sally Mann and Carrie Mae Weems.
One room over, young artist Mason Booker had floated back over to his work, a sort of street narrative told in three vivid sections. A recent graduate of the Davis Academy for Arts and Design Innovation Magnet School (known colloquially and almost universally as Davis Street School), Booker plans to head to Lone Star High School in Frisco, Tex., where his family is moving in the fall. Before he did, he wanted to document his community, one person at a time.
“I see this beautiful lady, walk up to her, and ask her for a picture,” he said, describing the impact of photographers like Bey and Andre Wagner on his work. Prior to the program, he’d never learned about Black men in photography. “To see someone like me take photos of his culture, our culture” was exciting to him.
Booker's work.
Once he had started chronicling a street fair in New Haven, he didn’t want to stop: he could see potential for new work everywhere. A t-shirt emblazoned with Malcolm X, for instance, “was very empowering,” and told a whole story of Black resistance and revolution that he wanted to capture.
Down the street, an attendee's swagger, “the way he held himself up,” immediately stood out to him. He lifted his camera, adjusted his focus, and was thrilled with the result.
“I’ve learned a whole new world of photography,” he said of the program. “Ms. Kim has opened up my eyes, created a new way for me to see.”
That’s part of the program’s goal, Weston said—particularly as it welcomes back students for a second or third year. It’s by design, for instance, that some photographs feature current and former Wábi fellows, creating whole layers of seeing and being seen. In Snigtha Mohanraj’s Blended, for instance, the young artist has pictured Luca Jaden Rivera, whose work dazzled in a similar exhibition at the now-defunct KNOWN Coworking last year.
“The program is to teach young photographers, young artists, young people, how to sustain themselves with a camera,” Weston said. “These students … they allowed me to give them my knowledge and to be a mentor to them as well. It wasn’t just about photography, but giving them a safe space that they could come to to express themselves.”