Renée Lopez and Ricardo Nagaoka

Renée Lopez A small town girl from Central Washington (Yakima to be exact), Miss Lopez moved to Portland in 2006 to get a fresh start for her and her daughter. She had been doing photography as a hobby since the 10th grade, and in 2015 Renée became involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, making good friends with Portland rapper Glenn Waco. That’s where it all started. Miss Lopez quickly realized she could use her camera as a tool to not only document injustices and the movement, but as a form of resistance as well. In pursuit of her love for live music, she also began shooting the local hip-hop scene. Her work photographing local artists over the past two years has documented how much the scene has very recently flourished. Miss Lopez started her Women of Color in PDX series in March 2016; she felt it was important to highlight WOC here, spread love for each other, and send a message of self-love and unity. Growing up, Miss Lopez didn’t have a lot of women as friends; she didn’t trust women because of deep-seated misogyny she picked up from having a military father. The Women of Color project has also been a source of healing for the artist to work through those issues and also make lifelong friends. She shares a picture of each woman alongside a story about who they are and what they do. Miss Lopez has been told she has an eye for truly capturing people and who they are. “I just want to make a difference in someone’s life with my work, help people, tell their story.”

Ricardo Nagaoka  is a Japanese photographer born in Asunción, Paraguay. He immigrated Canada in 2005, found himself in Rhode Island to attend the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA Photography 2015), then drove across the country to live in Portland, OR. His work seeks to question cultural identities, the multiplicity of home, and our relationship to the physical space we inhabit. Born in the inescapable entanglement of globalization, he is constantly searching for boundaries, observing how spaces are delineated and finding ways to crumble arbitrary borders.

A Thousand Words (Squared)

Miss Lopez Media is doing important work.  Difficult, time-consuming, emotionally-tolling, resource-dwindling work.

In talking with Renée Lopez, and in listening to her discuss her long-term project, the WOC photo series, it becomes poignantly clear just how much joy and fulfillment she receives from creating these moments and photographs.  It’s not just about lighting and set-decorating. Nor is it a matter of just posing these women and pointing a camera at them.  Many a photographer’s studio floor and trash can are brimming with failed attempts to capture their subjects without a solid understanding of who they are as human beings.  Lopez, through her work in community engagement and activism, seeks out women of color specifically. She spends time with them, creates a sacred trust, susses out the stories they are willing to share, and, quite successfully, recreates these stories in photographic form.

And if that were the only part of this work, that would be enough.

But it is not.

Indeed, Renée Lopez is part of a long lineage and history of archivists who do the impossible:  uncovering the willfully obscured voices and narratives of Black and Brown women; shining a beautiful and brilliant light upon the faces of those whom society has been taught to ignore.

In a small but elegant gallery space, in the middle of St. Johns in Portland, was a room covered from end to end with thousands and thousands of stories; beaming brightly upon us, defiant with roughness, grace, music, color, sound, concrete, flora and fauna.  Stories that have traditionally been denied the attention and prestige of museum walls due to...well, you know.

But give Lopez time.  

These stores can’t and won’t be ignored.  Neither will this work.

-Melanie Stevens

a place made whole : ricardo nagaoka

by maximiliano

ricardo nagaoka makes up one half of our july show at c3 : initiative, the other being renee lopez. both photographers, in NTP’s first photography show.  i first met ricardo at an NTP show actually lol, ricardo grew up in paraguay and is of japanese descent, a lot of his work focuses on photographing immigrant communities, often times in their homes.

when you walk into c3, you enter the first room and immediately see ricardo nagaoka  a place made whole and just below that is a b&w print that sits confidently in its black frame. the image with a person. and when you enter the next room one wall opens wide to four color photos of nagaoka’s, two staged portraits of individuals, these portraits flank two more abstract center images of hands holding shells. this four pieces really resonant and communicate with each other, a manicured contemplation.

his work ends on the opposite wall with a portrait of person laying in their side in what appears to be there bedroom, to hold that space.