My father the artist Guillermo Ceniceros is my main artistic influence. He is a painter and I am a photographer. He is known for his signature structural figurative studies of the body as well as for his rocky mountain petraeus landscapes. This post is about the latter and how surprisingly I came face to face with his work in my own set of photos from Zion, Utah.
My father’s interest in a specific type of landscape painting dates back to his teenage years. In the town where he lived there were massive quarries that expressed a barren and raw rocky type of mountain face that captured his interest. He would build mountainous structures that belonged to no specific place but that of his canvas. These rocky mountain paintings were around the house as I grew up. In the paintings there were places that I dreamt perhaps existed somewhere else. I remember looking at a particularly large landscape of a mountain front face and thinking about where I would carve the flat edges needed for a road to the top.
In my adult life and as a photographer I’ve travelled quite a bit and have always looked to the landscape around knowing that likely there would be amazing views. Nonetheless, when asked if my father’s landscapes resembled a place, all I could think of was my father’s own words and saying that he imagined that the Atacama desert could have this type of landscape. In his work, like in Atacama there is no vegetation, only dry barren monumental rocks. My father like myself have never been to Atacama.
Another place that my father has never been to is the Southwest of the United States. This year was my first in this area as I visited the Zion National park in Utah. There for the first time and to my gleeful astonishment I saw my father’s mountains. The monumental barren rock faces that line up the Zion canyon were both new and familiar. These were rock faces that I had to photograph. On my return home and as I started to process the fresh raw files I saw on my desktop what could pass as a painting of my father. Only it was one of my photos. It was a revelation that I quickly shared with him, as he asked for more photos. It felt like a moment of celebration, tho not sure of what. I’ll caveat that finding this photo, or this type of photography was not something I was pursuing. Yet it is something that was always there and with me waiting for the right place and moment.
The unprocessed files showed the familiar red clay color of the area and its blue skies. I processed these photos to extract only what is important me and what I see as an aesthetic that keeps evolving thru the years and sometimes shows the influence of painting. The photos above are my fathers’ paintings and the photos below are my photographs. Thanks for the read if you came this far.
Guillermo Ceniceros Unbound 