let it go
Growing up as a Catholic Latina, I was very aware of the desirable attributes prescribed to women of my faith, including chastity. At the time, I did not dare to question them out loud. I adhered to them innocently, thinking that this was the way the world operated. In my practice, I photograph women in order to free myself from that conditioning. In Let It Go, I explore femininity collaboratively, working with close friends and acquaintances in a full, frank, and free way. In moody, narrative-driven compositions, we explore desire and desirability, and question the myriad expectations of women and how we are portrayed.
fictitious family
I am the youngest sibling and only daughter in a household of Mexican immigrants. The dissonance between my desires and my culture’s expectations made me anxious. My father’s diagnosis of early on-set Alzheimers, and my family’s inability to have an open discussion about his condition, only made things worse. I turned to photography to express these inner inquietudes, impressionistically exploring events and anxieties.
In my series, Fictitious Family, I have utilized my own family’s photo album. I took those images into the color darkroom, placing them in the negative carrier. The results created a negative which expressed how my father’s disease inverted my family’s dynamics and familial relationships inside out and upside down.
mood, memory, or myth
“The room is dark, but our eyes gradually adjust to the darkness.” After Dark -Haruki Murakami
My ongoing series Mood, Memory, or Myth is an exploration of the human experiences and memories of fear, anxiety, and pleasure, and the impact of growing up in a family that refuses to discuss any of that. Sex, sadness, death, and family illnesses are subjects that my family considers taboo. My family’s inability to discuss these subjects openly left me without a voice. I found that depicting these forbidden subjects empowers me, allowing me to explore my feminine desires, my sadnesses, and to come to terms with the expectations my family and my Mexican culture imposed on me as a female: to wed and have children. I create illusions that conjure the realms of the imagination without presenting a factual reality. Something very personal and complex, but which allows viewers to relate freely on their own terms. I use these subjects and memories to help me navigate the anxieties caused by my family’s expectations of me as a woman, and to fill the space left by my family’s silence on these taboos.
I work traditionally, shooting film, Polaroids, paper negatives, and making darkroom chromogenic prints, occasionally incorporating mixed media. Analog production allows me to insert more of myself into each print.
en un instante
En un instante is a junction between two nerve cells where a gap between an impulse and my sx70 attempt to express of my cinematic dreams. It is a world that may conflict with reality and life. Feelings, thoughts, and symbols, appear and I use them to make sense of the world that I dreamt about.
red is the color of…
I started with a single red dot then a smear and then the redness just continued from that point on… The women in these images symbolize the goddess of love and fertility. Love, and life alone are complex let alone fertility. Red is a color that recurs in my mixed media pieces. Red being a powerful and energetic color draws attention to areas inside the photograph, and has a natural influence over us and our emotions. I use red to explore love, life, health, and power.
Oocitos Ovarios - red, blue, and you
During my recent move, I rediscovered these images and started experimenting, using stitching and oil pastels. They became this project, “Oocitos Ovarios - Red, Blue and You.”
The mixed media process has helped me express my ideas about female fertilization of oocytes and bodily autonomy. Fertilization is complex and can become more complex depending on circumstances, and a female can find herself fertilized against her wishes…only she should decide what is to become of her oocytes upon fertilization.
The red in the photographs represents the oocytes and the decisions that may arise upon fertilization of those eggs and the blue represents tranquility upon making those difficult decisions. In imaginative tableaus, these images celebrate women, alluding to imagination, sensations of isolation, and femininity. This work contemplates the complexities of being a women by using color, and texture to draw attention within the photograph to psychologically reference the strength of being a women.
between the sun and the moon...
With the closing of the community darkroom in San Francisco, my darkroom rituals became dissrupted. The question that came to mind - what next? The inbetween and continuation of what’s next hung in the air.
These shots are the inbetween - the sun and the moon - my daily encounters, and inspirations. My interests of light, and shadow, fleeting moments that make me pull the trigger.
The images allude to a larger dialogue - the covid era: the displacement of peoples, symbols of death, memorials of injustices that have been done to brown and black bodies, and yet we find our nation crying over toilet paper - that toilet paper becomes historically symbolic - the heavy issues at hand that are still left unresolved. Me moving, and adapting to my body changes, of me leaving familiar things behind and documenting them before I walk out the door.
These fleeting urges of life happening “as is.” The stuff at first view can easily be overlooked, but somehow they fit in with the way I make sense of the world. These images are a visual journal of the times I live in.
My thoughts continue to wax and wane…
Contact
talk 415.425.3375
email me@shesaidred.com
insta @shesaidred
read blog.shesaidred.com/
bigcartel: https://shesaidred.bigcartel.com
campsite: https://campsite.bio/shesaidred
About
Norma Córdova (aka, shesaidred)
Córdova is a Mexican-American artist, born and raised in Oregon, by hard working Mexican immigrant parents. Her image based work creates illusions that conjure the realms of the imagination without presenting a factual reality. They intersect femininity, self identity, and wonder. Her work has been exhibited in the US and abroad, and has been published in The New Yorker, New York Times, Vice, PDN, and Lenscratch. In 2020, Córdova was included in the Top Photolucida 50 Critical Mass, and won best of show at the Center for Photographic Art’s International Juried Exhibition.
She is currently moving her creative practice to a new home, working on building a color darkroom, and also helping interpret in asylum cases for the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights.
Education
2021 | AS, Photography, San Francisco City College, San Francisco, CA
2016 | Art of Filmmaking 1, NW Film Center, Portland, OR
2009-2014 | Todd Hido Studio, Professional Activities, Oakland, CA
Selected Honors and Awards
“AAP Magazine #29 Women” 3rd Place, All About Photo Dec 2023
“Top 40 Analog Images of 2022!” Analog Forever Zine, Dec
2022
“Alternative Processes Competition 2022, Soho Photo Gallery, Nov, 2022
“AAP Magazine #26 Shapes” Merit Award’s, All About Photo Oct 2022
“Let It Go” Sold Out Quantum Artist, July, 2022
“2020 CPA International Juried Exhibition” Center for Photographic Art, Dec 2020
“Critical Mass Top 50” Photolucida, Sept 2020
“Top 40 Analog Images of 2019!” Analog Forever Zine, Jan 2020
Group Exhibits
2023
Portals: Windows, Mirrors, and Doors, Photo Place Gallery, Honorable Mention, Laura Moya, Middlebury, VT
Hold Up The Sky, Dallas Center for Photography, juror, Aline Smithson, Dallas, TX
2022
Shades of Gray 10th Anniversary Photography Exhibit, Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland, CA
Nude Geographies, Praxis Photo Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Alternative Processes Competition 2022, Soho Photo Gallery, New York, NY
2020
THHE Auction Online Hospitality House, San Francisco, CA
Annual’s Members’ Show, jury selected, Ann Jastrab, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Denver, CO
Fifth Annual The Creative Portrait, jury selected Paul Kopeikin, LACP, Los Angeles, CA
2019
Kindred Spirits, Grey Loft Gallery, Oakland, CA
Portal, jury selected, Ann Jastrab, Honorable Mention, Johnson City, TX
Dreamscapes: mood, memory, or myth, Shibumi Gallery, Berkeley, CA
Contemporary Portraiture, The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO
Something Blue, jury selected, Ann Jastrab, Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland, CA
2018
Exquisite Little Things, jury selected, Jan Watten, Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland, OR
In Gratitude, jury selected, Laura Valenti, LightBox Photographic Gallery, Astoria, OR
Odd, jury selected, Russell Joslin, LightBox Photographic Gallery, Astoria, OR
Plastic Camera Show, jury selected, Ann Jastrab, Honorable Mention, Santa Clara Univ Art Dept, Santa Clara, CA
Expanding Boundaries, jury selected, Scott B. Davis, LACP, Los Angeles, CA
Light Sensitive, Art Intersection Street Project, Gilbert, AZ
Interior, Seities Magazine, Shelf Life Books, EXPOSURE Photo Festival, Calgary, Canada
Seeing Red, Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland, CA
The Creative Portrait, LACP, Los Angeles, CA
2017
Off The Wall, Art Intersection Street Project, Gilbert, AZ
Light Sensitive, Art Intersection Street Project, Gilbert, AZ
Hospitality House Annual Art Auction, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, CA
Rayko’s 10th Annual International Plastic Camera Show, Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco, CA
2016
Untitled, Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco, CA
2015
Art For The House, Arc Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Hospitality House Annual Art Auction, White Walls Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2012 Not Kansas: Photographers Explore Their Own Worlds, Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco, CA
Film
2016 “Un Ostión.” Screening, Whitsell Theater, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR
Publications
“Conceptional Photography” Art Doc Photography April 2023
“AAP Magazine #29 Women” 3rd Place, All About Photo Dec 2023
“AAP Magazine #26 Shapes” Merit Award’s, All About Photo Oct 2022
“Let It Go” Quantum Art, July, 2022
“Offside Constantly” The New Yorker, June, 2021
“Every Belarusian Journalist I know Is in Jail or Exile” New York Times May, 2021
“Let It Go” Lenscratch July 2020
“Alzheimer’s In The Family: Searching For Lost Fragments Of My Childhood” Edge Of Humanity Magazine March 2020
“7 Photographers On Alzheimer’s, Dementia & Heartbreaking Memory Loss” Vice Magazine Feb 2020
“Private 2020” PHOTODARIUM, inner cover Jan 2020
“Top 40 Analog Images of 2019!” Analog Forever Zine, Jan 2020
“Mood, Memory, or Myth” Float Magazine Aug 2019
“Loosen Up” Analog Forever Zine Aug 2019
“Shadows” AAP Magazine Dec 2019
“Top 40 Analog Photographers of 2019” Analog Forever Zine. Dec 2019
“Issue 24” The Hand Magazine April 2019
“Issue 23” The Hand Magazine Jan 2019
“No More Bad Nudes” PDN Magazine Dec 2018
“Winter/Spring 18/19 Seities Magazine 2018
“Don’t Take Pictures” Photo Of The Day, Kat Kiernan, Editor-in-Chief Sept 2018
“Interior.” Seities Magazine, Polaroid Competition Winner Interview Winter/Spring Issue Dec 2018
“Your Daily Photograph.” Emerging/Contemporary Aug 2017
“Your Daily Photograph.” Emerging/Contemporary Jan 2014
Collections
Center for Photographic Arts, Carmel, CA
Pacific Grove Museum, Pacific Grove, CA
Hospitality House, San Francisco, CA
SF Camera Works, San Francisco, CA
Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco, CA
Lectures
2015 Photographer’s Portfolio, City College Of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
2012 Out Of Sight, Rayko Photo Center San Francisco, CA
©2006- She Said Red. All rights reserved.