Self-taught photographer Luis Garza began his career as a photojournalist documenting the turbulent social events of the 60s for La Raza magazine, which was a counter-balance to the prevailing conservative and often racist media narratives. His latest exhibit of 63 silver gelatin print photographs features images documenting the Chicano photographer’s East Los Angeles community, his South Bronx neighborhood, and his 1971 travels to Budapest, Hungary, where he met Mexican muralist and social realist, David Alfaro Siqueiros. It’s a wide-ranging, international, and bi-coastal perspective—a fraught and often violent socio-political microcosm of Los Angeles and East Coast histories, but there are also poignant images of “everyman” as resolute figures.

Curator Armando Durón has cleverly organized the photographs in pairs, ostensibly to provoke dialogue between each other and with the viewer. One such duo is an image of Siqueiros matched with director and playwright Luis Valdez, founder of the storied El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Workers’ Theater)—a witty pairing of two cultural giants. Each figure is animated, hands pointed, signifying an existential way forward.  But some solo pictures are singularly emotive, such as a pensive portrait of the legendary Cesar Chávez (1974) or the coquettish Say Girl! (1974) which pictures a Black woman in her flirty element. In the same way documentary photographer Susan Meiselas centered on unexpected New York scenes, and Dennis Feldman focused on Hollywood street life, Garza was intent on capturing both the profound and the everyday—but those distinctions are elusive at best. Some compositions are stronger than others, but the net impact is noteworthy. The exhibit is a very small slice of Garza’s prolific output; his archive contains more than 8,000 images, a substantial body of work yet to be revealed.

The Other Side of Memory: Photographs by Luis C. Garza
Los Angeles Central Library
On view through July 13, 2025