Photographer's Close View of Cultura

By Monica Rhor, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HOUSTON - With his Nikon D2X camera balanced on a tripod and natural light glinting through an open doorway, Chuy Benitez stood inside the waiting room of the Auto Chrome Plating Company.

He waited for nearly four hours: for the shot he had envisioned since first stumbling upon the shop tucked in an industrial pocket of southeast Houston months earlier; for the scene that would encapsulate the juncture of work and family life in this business owned by a Mexican-American family.

As the minutes passed on that Friday afternoon, Benitez waited for the instant when children would tumble into the space already brimming with workers in blue jumpsuits, wheels of polished chrome and stuffed deer heads mounted on the walls.

Suddenly, the shop owner's children spilled into the room and a dark-haired, ponytailed girl waved a doll with tresses just like her own, beguiling her grandfather who still wore his rumpled mechanic's uniform.

"This is what I've been looking for," Benitez recalls thinking.

Over the next eight minutes, the young photographer fired off the frames that would be melded together to create "Family Chrome Shop," an oversized panoramic photograph that is part of a series called "Houston Cultura."

That series, and Benitez's collection of portraits of Houston's Mexican-American community leaders, offer an intimate view of an often marginalized population through tableaux of events plucked from the daily life of Mexican-Americans. Both are currently on exhibit through April 12 at the Lawndale Art Gallery in Houston.

"It's a really great look into an important part of the Houston community," said Dennis Nance, the gallery's director of exhibitions and programming. "It's focusing on one community, but accessible to everyone. It says, 'This is who we are,' but it is not exclusive."

Like "Family Chrome Shop," in which a multitude of images, actions and story lines fill a 110-inch-by-36-inch frame, Benitez's work captures the juxtaposition of young and old, modern and mythic, ordinary and unusual, Mexican and American.

In one piece from "Houston Cultura," a group of charros, or Mexican cowboys, riding horseback and wielding lassos converge on a downtown intersection. In another, a mariachi band in finely embroidered costumes entertains shoppers inside a Fiesta supermarket.

"I went through all these transformations of finding those things in the community and I'm just trying to pass that along," says Benitez, a 24-year-old with a sharply trimmed goatee and amber eyes. "If you know nothing about it, look, I knew nothing. Let me show you what there is."
Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, Benitez grew up living in a place where the two cultures existed side-by-side, but separately.

As a child, he was taught the lessons of the Chicano civil rights movement, which emphasized the search for identity and independence. He fed his artistic hunger by studying the work of 

Chicano photographers and Mexican muralists.
It wasn't until he went to the University of Notre Dame that he realized the mix of cultures within him.

"I thought I was American. From growing up in El Paso, living on one side of border, I thought that made you American," says Benitez, who is of Mexican descent. "But I realized I'm so not purely American. I'm such a hybrid."

After he graduated from college, Benitez began to look for other examples of hybridity. He found the perfect muse in Houston, a city where Mexican and American cultures are fused on an almost molecular level.

"There's no border, so it's all just mashing up and doing whatever it wants to do. No holds barred. It's just free," he says about Houston.

Benitez began to document "Houston Cultura" three years ago, after he entered graduate school at the University of Houston and a fellowship at the UH Center for Mexican-American Studies.

For that series, Benitez chose to use a digital panoramic technique in which multiple shots of the same scene are layered together, creating a richly textured canvas that reflects the influence of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and Saturnino Herran.

In "Leaders of Houston Cultura," Benitez's portraits of community leaders, he used a fisheyed, wide-angle lens to create 360-degree diptychs, which serve as metaphors for the subjects' dual cultural identity. So far, Benitez has shot more than 40 portraits.

In Benitez's panoramic photographs, as in Mexican murals, the wide frame encompasses a profusion of details and activities. The main subjects - ordinary people whose lives often go unheralded - loom large in the foreground. But every crevice and corner contains an additional nugget of information about the subject's lives.

"I wanted to get physically close to everyone and everything," he notes. "If I'm getting close, if I'm getting more in-depth than anyone else is, then my photographs are going to communicate that to other people and people will hopefully get feeling of having a connection with the community. "The focus may be the Mexican-American community, but the themes, he says, are simple and universal: work, family, music, religion.

"La Virgen de la Baking Pan" shows a family on a pilgrimage to a makeshift shrine where they pay homage to an incarnation of the Virgin Mary on a piece of cookware. Protected by umbrellas, the family seems to move toward the icon with both reverence and fear.

The baking pan itself is draped with rosaries and flanked by candles bearing the likeness of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the "brown-skinned virgin" who is said to have appeared before Mexican peasant Juan Diego in 1531. In the far corner, a neighbour sits on his porch, undisturbed by the otherworldly occurrence.

In many of the works, tiny markers of Houston (often Houston Astros paraphernalia) pop up amid the chaos - a reminder that the photographs are not only portraits of people but also of a city in transformation.

"These are simply things worth sharing because I want there to be better understanding of where I come from and where Houston is going. Houston is officially a Hispanic city," Benitez says.

"It goes along with what the future is going to hold, which is a browner America."

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