Featured in MCAD's CUT/PASTE 2024
How do you teach photography when everyone’s got a camera in their pocket?
For photographer Xavier Tavera, ‘14, an assistant professor at Carleton College, the answer is about encouraging his students to approach image-making as a process of illumination.
“At the end of the day, photography is an excuse for me to be in places that sometimes I don't belong, and attempting to have an understanding of the situation,” he says. “What I’m trying to sell to students now is the photo experience–when you get an idea, struggle with it, get out of your comfort zone, go talk to somebody, and then try to produce an image. It’s that whole process that I believe is important.”
A self-taught photographer and law school student at the time, Tavera left his hometown of Mexico city to work for a company that brought him to Minnesota, and then paid him to pursue his studies at MCAD. But before he completed his degree, the company went bankrupt and Tavera was forced to drop out, eventually finding work in a granite factory. As he pursued his own artistic practice, he turned his lens on the Mexican diaspora through projects that have explored everything from the Spanish-speaking culture of Minneapolis’s Lake Street to the contributions of Latino veterans.
“When I am in the United States, I have all of these labels–I am an immigrant, I am a person of color, I am Mexican-American, Latino, Hispanic. Trying to grapple with all these terms, and how people see me, is an interesting thing to analyze,” he says. “I turned the camera to my community, in part to resolve that–which I still have not resolved–but also to give representation to people who have been here for hundreds of years, underrepresented. I want to put in a good light the contributions of Mexicans and Latinos to this country, which are enormous, but, for the most part, not acknowledged.”
Though he enjoys describing himself as “a proud two-times drop-out,” frequent requests to teach inspired Tavera to return to MCAD, where he finished his degree with help from a Presidential Scholarship, followed by an MFA at the University of Minnesota. “Those two years were very formative, and the professors at an MCAD were wonderful, talking about photography in a critical way and pushing me all the time to question what I was doing,” he says. It’s an approach that has shaped how he teaches, particularly as film technology has evolved.
“This is a very interesting time for photography,” he says, with digital formats and AI platforms “that would have been unbelievable when I was a student. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure what I'm going to be teaching in five years, but the stories I encounter as a photographer, that’s what I’m enamored with. Not actually the final paper thing that is going to be framed on a wall for people to see–that's a byproduct. It is about the experience, and that is what I try to convey to my students.”
