January 20, 2020

Meet Jacqueline Ramirez

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jacqueline Ramirez.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Jacqueline. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My family moved to San Diego when I was six years old. My father had been in the military and was stationed in Germany where he met my mother. For several years we lived in France where my brother and I were born.

Having only been around my German mother’s family and our French family friends, coming to San Diego and meeting my Mexican grandparents and hearing them speak Spanish was transformative. I knew our family was different from other families – at least in my mind – and it I felt pretty isolated as a kid. Reading, art and eventually photography gave me solace.

The first photographic images I remember studying intently were preserved inside my parents’ photo albums. Inside, were photographs of people who were unknown to me; at parties, weddings and picnics by the side of a lake. There were casual black and white snapshots of my parents taken on a vacation in Italy: my mother dressed in heels and gloves, my father holding bottles of Chianti. Their lives seemed adventurous to an imaginative kid like me. They didn’t explain specific images to me in great detail, so with an imagination fueled by fiction and the make believe world of movies, I constructed my ever-changing reality from the photographs.

I don’t remember when I received my first camera, maybe as a teen or a bit younger? It seems as if I always had a camera with me. This particular camera was a Kodak Instamatic. The film was contained within a cartridge that could be inserted into the camera. Super easy to use, just point and click! The physical act of photographing was very fluid. Something sparked my interest and I would put the viewfinder up to my eye and snap. Taking photos became a means to explore, question and validate many of my experiences. My photos became tangible sources of memory from specific moments in my life, joyous, sad or otherwise; they are still among my most treasured mementos.

Eventually, I earned a BA in Journalism (Photojournalism emphasis) from SDSU and an MFA in Art (Creative Photography) from Cal State Fullerton. By the time I got to Fullerton, I was experimenting with content, video and sound, and alternative printing and processing techniques.

Currently, I teach photography classes at both Grossmont and Mesa colleges. I have always wanted to teach and being able to share my love for photography with students has been a challenging, fun, immensely satisfying journey.

Has it been a smooth road?
My father died suddenly when I was 17 and my life was forever altered. He and my mother both instilled a curiosity and love of art, along with an appreciation of travel and various cultures, but it was my dad who actively encouraged my youthful artistic expression. My mom was left to care for my younger brother and me, she didn’t remarry. It was a challenging time for our family.

I felt completely alone, unmoored and adrift. I enrolled in a photography course at community college and although I didn’t complete the course, I continued taking photographs with my first “real” 35mm camera. It was around this time that the punk rock music scene became popular. I spent many nights going to shows, taking pictures and becoming inspired by punk’s rejection of traditional aesthetic norms and philosophy of individualism. I photographed many notable punk rock artists including the Ramones, Iggy Pop, Johnny Thunders, Patti Smith and Richard Hell. To this day, the photographs I made during this time period are among my favorites. I am proud of this work because although I wasn’t the most technically proficient photographer then, I realized that heartfelt artistic expression – cliché as it sounds – could sometimes be superior to flawless technique. During that time, a friend and I published an alternative music zine (the first in San Diego at the time) called Substitute. Most recently, some of my photographs and issues of Substitute were included in an exhibition called I’m Not Like You: Notes From the San Diego Underground at the San Diego History Center in Balboa Park.

The feeling of community with friends from the punk scene and my close relationship with my brother helped me get through this time.

Please tell us about your work.
With my personal photography, I am interested in looking at and analyzing ordinary, unremarkable moments and sites within contemporary society. The suburban environment is particularly fascinating to me, and I continue to experiment with alternative or non-traditional processes.

For me, teaching is not just demonstrations and how to lectures, but encouraging students to expand their ways of thinking about photography (and the world), and defining what photography means for them. Although digital photography is emphasized in most of the courses, students also learn about analog film and get to make prints in a darkroom which helps give them a deeper understanding and appreciation of the medium. It’s so much fun watching their enthusiasm when they see their image revealed in the developer tray. One course I love teaching explores the history of photography. Once students have some knowledge of the artists who came before and can recognize the influences throughout the history of the medium, their appreciation grows.

My students inspire, surprise (and sometimes bewilder) me but each interaction has taught me to find ways to better communicate, empathize, and hopefully motivate them to create images they are satisfied with. “She is very tough and expects a lot, but she is very fair. Learn everything you can from her,” is a student evaluation I received one year. The essential quality most important for what I do? Patience.

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