Life & Work with Alicia Archuleta

Today we’d like to introduce you to Alicia Archuleta.

Hi Alicia, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
Photography has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I had my parents’ old cameras in my toy box, and my mom made me stand in front of every sign and landmark from Florida to California. As soon as I was allowed, I would take the camera from my mom to be the photographer and got my first camera in I think 5th grade. It was a Snappy Q, a 35 mm point-and-shoot camera, and I felt like I was something. I used it until it didn’t work anymore and upgraded to a Pentax zoom camera, then I was really big stuff in my mind.

I took pictures of everyone at school in the last few days and loved every minute of it. By 7th grade, I was hooked. A friend of mine would get the camera from the yearbook but never wanted to take photos with it so I did it for her. This was my first experience with a fully manual camera, my beloved Canon AE-1. Our 7th and 8th-grade yearbooks have tons of my photos in them. From that point on I wanted to take pictures all the time to capture history and beauty in the world. In my junior year, I was selected to the yearbook staff at my high school and started learning the darkroom and a photojournalistic style of shooting.

I no longer wanted to get my friends in a cluster all looking at the camera I wanted to get them in their natural state and being authentically themselves. I loved the darkroom more than shooting almost. Any spare time I had during or after school I was begging my adviser to let me come in and develop or print. It was my place of peace and solitude, and sometimes my therapy office when friends were in need of advice. More than once I got the knock, “Alicia are you in there? I need to talk.” I could print off of just about anything including a roll of color film we had accidentally developed with black and white chemicals.

It was the little things at that point in my journey. Through college, I worked for the campus magazine and newspaper for scholarship money and experience. The theatre department held my muses, and they were always willing to work with me in exchange for headshots and prints. Then senior year, I interned at the local newspaper and wound up working there as a visual journalist for 5 years before returning to my alma mater to earn my Master of Arts in Teaching, so I could begin effecting change in the world through teaching the young people in my community to appreciate art, languages, and truth in reporting.

I abandoned my camera outside of work until I started teaching. I carried my camera every day for those 5 years and had the opportunity to cover a ton of things, including Dancing in the District (Blondie and PFunk) and Bonnaroo (2002 and 2003), but I also had some unpleasant things to cover that my brain has erased for me. After my transition to teaching full-time, I decided to start carrying my camera for fun again.

Soon, I was shooting weddings, families, babies, and headshots. I did art shows alone and with my students for our local Art Walk; I felt alive again artistically. Over the last 15 years, I have been blessed to be a part of my student and client’s lives some of whom are one and the same.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
As artists for hire, we are often our own worst enemy. When I decided to get back into shooting I really had to get out of my own way in regards to editing. I constantly remind myself that I didn’t even do straight out of the camera when I was shooting and developing my own black and white work, and Eckard, Hills, Kmart, or whoever had the best deal for color developing were doing my color prints. I was afraid I didn’t have a style or a look.

I had to realize that I didn’t have to go with the latest editing trends every time they changed but that I needed to be true to myself and the people I was working with. I try very hard to keep the images as authentic to the situation as possible but enhanced to match what the eye would have seen in the situation versus having a warm or cool look like a lot of artists do. This winds up taking me longer to perfect the edit of a session but it feels right to me.

Overall the biggest struggles I have dealt with are the what-ifs, self-criticism, and comparing myself to others in the field. The most important thing to remember with art and artistic services is that everyone has a place, someone is going to like what you do compare to what someone else does and vice versa.

Being yourself and authentic to your own work and process and continuing to grow is the most important part of doing what you do. There isn’t a preset package or a camera that is going to make you a better artist. The only thing that can improve your work is self-reflection, taking criticism and advice from others you admire, and staying at it.

In general, as a wife, mother, friend, daughter, teacher, artist, and human, my personal struggle is finding the balance in life that I need to be the best in all areas of my life. I continually evaluate and fail at being well balanced by hyper-focusing on one area and then the next.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Archuleta Photography is my way to do art and provide the photographic services people want to capture the history of their lives. From portrait sessions, custom art pieces, event coverage from birthday parties to concerts and sports photography, I think the breadth of my experience is what sets me apart from a lot of other photographers.

I am not afraid to try any situation or lighting but am honest with the clients that it may not be exactly what they have in their minds when we get done. Collaborating with my clients is a big deal to me. I want them to feel comfortable and a part of what is going on while we are working to collect their images. I like to be the fly on the wall and give them the chance to get authentic interaction with each other instead of forced smiles.

I am honestly not sure what I am known for, though I do remember someone mentioning they knew if one of my photos was in print on the paper because of my diagonal lines that are pretty consistent in my work. Around the community I am probably better known as a teacher at this point, having been at it for 15 years.

I have been teaching students photography the entire time, either in after-school programs, journalism classes, or private lessons. I saw a need for preteens and teens that wasn’t offered so I started doing it. Seeing kids not afraid to be creative makes it all worth it. So many of my students are terrified of creating and it is wrong.

My personal work focus tends to be travel photography and architectural photography. I love the way the light plays on natural and man-made wonders. I want to get back into more concert photography because it combines two things that make me happy outside of my family.

Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
A word of advice. Always follow your dreams and your gut when it comes to what you do for work.

I fell in love with photography as a kid and went through all the things I “should” be, but graduated and became what I wanted much to the fear of my mom (who was afraid I would be a starving artist). When the time came that the work I was doing had sucked the joy out of it, I found my second calling to teach children to try to reduce the things I wanted to be eradicated from the world (violence, wrecks, etc). In this second calling, I rediscovered my first love and get to use it for good.

(SN: To explain part of why I quit being a visual journalist. I have a blackout from a wreck scene I did not have time to prep for. You have a shut-off switch almost like a first responder that puts you into work mode and I didn’t have time to turn it on at one scene and I honestly can’t tell you what I saw other than that I remember the EMT lifting a sheet and the next thing I remember I was hyperventilating being told by the Captain and my direct supervisor it was ok while standing in the middle of a major road in town.

I don’t know when my supervisor arrived. After that, I didn’t want to go to work anymore and 2 years later I became a teacher. I finally have started looking and assessing wreck scenes when I come upon them again but I NEVER want to have to do that again).

Contact Info:

• Email: amarchuletaphotography@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archuletaphotography/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Archuletaphotography/

Image Credits
Trinity Faulkner and Alicia Archuleta