Mossless in America is a new column featuring interviews with documentary photographers. The series is produced in partnership with Mossless magazine, an experimental photography publication run by Romke Hoogwaerts and Grace Leigh. Romke started Mossless in 2009 as a blog in which he interviewed a different photographer every two days, and since 2012 Mossless magazine has produced two print issues, each dealing with a different type of photography. Mossless was featured prominently in the landmark 2012 exhibition Millennium Magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is supported by Printed Matter, Inc. Their forthcoming third issue, a major photographic volume on American documentary photography from the last ten years titled The United States (2003-2013), will be published this spring.
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Kathya Landeros is a young American artist who photographs her family and Latino populations around the country. Her series Verdant Land alludes to the long history of agricultural work that has led Mexicans to the United States in search of a better life.Mossless: Where did you grow up?
Kathya Landeros: I grew up in the Sacramento Valley of Northern California, surrounded by farmland. There was a period where I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother in central Mexico. My parents sent my older sister and I to a parochial school that sat on top of a very steep hill in the central highlands of Mexico.Does your family appear in your photos?
There is a portrait of my grandmother in my series Verdant Land. She worked as a farm laborer when she was younger and first came to this country. I am also photographing my family for a separate, ongoing body of work in California.You mention in your artist statement that a lot of the settlements you photograph would be ghost towns if it weren’t for their Latino populations. What are these towns like?
The part of California where I am from is some of the most fertile land in our country, making the people who tend to it (a majority being Latino) quite productive. The land is very flat, and yet there is always evidence of rolling foothills and mountains never too far away. The sun also seems to produce the most intense heat and light here—really beautiful California light. This is especially true in the summer when the sun is high and its light is drawn out late into the evening. The land is usually laid out in a similar rectilinear fashion: a main business drag with homes surrounding it. The homes are enveloped by expansive farmland, which is the most defining feature that can be seen from the highway. When I think of these towns the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn and some of the other Bay Area Figurative Movement painters come to mind. Although their work is not specific to the towns I am photographing in, their rendition of light and geometry very much describes the West I know. Such a quiet view of the land also offers an interesting foil to the mythos of the rugged American West of cowboys.
Kathya Landeros: I grew up in the Sacramento Valley of Northern California, surrounded by farmland. There was a period where I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother in central Mexico. My parents sent my older sister and I to a parochial school that sat on top of a very steep hill in the central highlands of Mexico.Does your family appear in your photos?
There is a portrait of my grandmother in my series Verdant Land. She worked as a farm laborer when she was younger and first came to this country. I am also photographing my family for a separate, ongoing body of work in California.You mention in your artist statement that a lot of the settlements you photograph would be ghost towns if it weren’t for their Latino populations. What are these towns like?
The part of California where I am from is some of the most fertile land in our country, making the people who tend to it (a majority being Latino) quite productive. The land is very flat, and yet there is always evidence of rolling foothills and mountains never too far away. The sun also seems to produce the most intense heat and light here—really beautiful California light. This is especially true in the summer when the sun is high and its light is drawn out late into the evening. The land is usually laid out in a similar rectilinear fashion: a main business drag with homes surrounding it. The homes are enveloped by expansive farmland, which is the most defining feature that can be seen from the highway. When I think of these towns the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn and some of the other Bay Area Figurative Movement painters come to mind. Although their work is not specific to the towns I am photographing in, their rendition of light and geometry very much describes the West I know. Such a quiet view of the land also offers an interesting foil to the mythos of the rugged American West of cowboys.
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Are there a lot of ghost towns in the United States?
I would say so. In California, it appears that these farm towns are small and empty. To some they may seem insignificant because they are not heavily populated. And yet they are responsible for growing much of our food.There are other sorts of ghost towns. I am thinking of places with a great deal of history. I imagine the traces of this past can be seen as ghosts too.What is something you wish every American knew?
That kindness is not weakness.Kathya Landeros is a photographer who splits her time between New London, Connecticut, and Sacramento, California. She studied English and Hispanic Studies at Vassar before getting her masters in photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Last year, she was selected to do a coveted artist residency at the Center for Photography in Woodstock, NY. Follow Mossless magazine on Twitter.
I would say so. In California, it appears that these farm towns are small and empty. To some they may seem insignificant because they are not heavily populated. And yet they are responsible for growing much of our food.There are other sorts of ghost towns. I am thinking of places with a great deal of history. I imagine the traces of this past can be seen as ghosts too.What is something you wish every American knew?
That kindness is not weakness.Kathya Landeros is a photographer who splits her time between New London, Connecticut, and Sacramento, California. She studied English and Hispanic Studies at Vassar before getting her masters in photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Last year, she was selected to do a coveted artist residency at the Center for Photography in Woodstock, NY. Follow Mossless magazine on Twitter.
