ViewPoint Gallery International Photography Competition January 2025 winner
Artist Statement:
I have fragmented memories from before my family migrated from Colombia to the U.S. when I was a child. My life and upbringing have been a world of living displaced between two cultures, constantly moving around with no sense of home. As an adult returning to my parent’s homeland, I photographed what felt familiar.
Photography offered me a better way to understanding my lost heritage beyond any questions I could ask with my now broken Spanish. I often think about my extended family, the violent history of Colombia, it’s people and beauty, the poverty, and richness found in everyday life; and the kind of life I might have lived had we stayed, and who I might have become.
These photographs seek to reconcile my own path with those of my family, friends, and countless other Latin-American immigrants who have also navigated the experience in their own way.
La Tertulia
Camilo Ramirez
(USA)
The ViewPoint Gallery holds an annual jury-reviewed photography competition with one winning print displayed in our gallery each month.
For January 2025, we are featuring a photograph by Camilo Ramirez.
Biography
Camilo Ramirez is a Colombian American photographer based in Boston, MA. His long term projects explore the straddling of American and Colombian culture as seen in the landscape and through personal projects around family.
Camilo holds an MFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship Grant, Lensculture 50 Emerging Talent Award, winner of the BOAAT Press Photography Competition. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts-Boston, Ft. Wayne Museum of Art, Royal Photographic Society, Griffin Museum of Photography, SF Camerawork, the Houston Center for Photography, and been featured or reviewed in CNN Photos, the Boston Globe, Aint-Bad Magazine, Burn Magazine, and The Oxford American, among others.
He has served as Chair of the Society for Photographic Education-Northeast Chapter, and currently works as Associate Professor of Photography at Emerson College.