ELI’S STORY

Born: In a railroad boxcar, to poor migrant parents of Mexican/Spanish descent.

Place of birth: Kane, Wyoming (not even a ghost town now).

Native language: Spanish.

Grew up: In west Texas, near Lubbock.

First educational challenge: Failed first grade due to a language barrier.

In a nutshell, this is me. It was a miracle I stayed in school, much less finished school. My male role models were, for the most part, school drop-outs, alcoholics, or ruffians. The only art I was exposed to was body art—tattoos on human canvasses.

I write about my life story and life philosophy in my book, I Always Wanted To Be Somebody (But, I Settled For Much More: Me). It is a book about what you do when you don't know what to do. I went from being captured by adversity to capturing beauty through my photo art. Currently, I am the only distributor for my book.

I realized I liked art when I was in the second grade. It wasn’t until I enrolled in college that I gained the artistic know-how that was to become the foundation for my photography twenty years later. It was at Texas Tech University where I discovered the likes of Monet, Renoir, Dalí, Cezanne, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Degas, and other master artists. It was during those metamorphic years that I learned about color, design, balance, composition, and other factors that separate art from painting. Impressionism and surrealism really got my attention.

I will never forget an art assignment where we were told explicitly, “Your design must be contained within your frame.” Well, being the free, radical and independent thinker that I am, I broke the rules—my project extended outside my “frame.” Lucky for me, my instructor knew what it meant to be creative and that sometimes artists have to break the rules. I got an ‘A.’  

It wasn’t until twenty years after my art days in college that I was exposed to and bought my first 35mm SLR. I didn’t even know what an SLR (single-lens reflex) camera was! Besides learning about f/stops, shutter speeds and exposure, I found that everything else about good photography I had already learned years before as an art student.

I joined the Fort Worth, Texas camera club. It did not take me long to begin getting red and blue ribbons on my judged art. A year later, I was already selling my art as postcards. Less than three years after joining the camera club, I won the much-coveted “Best of Best” award for ‘B’ (beginners) slides at the Dallas/Fort Worth annual competition. I haven’t turned back since. Photo art has been, still is, and always will be, my life passion. A close cousin to this is my writing.

Today, I spend  a lot of my time shooting in and around Colorado and surrounding states, including hiking mountains over 14,000’ to create my images. I teach photo art workshops and classes, offer group presentations, schedule private field lessons, and provide my photo services for commercial use. The foundation for my photo art and teaching is based on my three photography models, or paradigms: I SEE SOMETHING,™ Eli's 5-Point Photo Art Model,™ and The Photo Image Creation Process.™  

No le quítes años a la vida; dale vida a los años. (Don’t take years from life; give life to the years)

V E G A P H O T O A R T @ G M A I L . C O M

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