Composite Map, 1996

María’s Great Expedition, 1995–96 Six framed photographs, map, and bilingual narrative While still a graduate student at the California Institute of the Arts, Fernandez began one of her best-known works: María’s Great Expedition. The conceptual installation chronicles the life of her maternal great-grandmother María Gonzales through a map, narrative text, and photographs. The map offers an alternative to the East-to-West narrative of American history that privileges Euro-American migration. In the images, Fernandez poses as her ancestor, recalling different photographic styles and genres in each. Deliberate anachronisms, such as a 1980s-style pocket purse worn in a photograph labeled “1919,” signal the artificiality of the scenes and emphasize the impossibility of embodying a memory.

1910, Leaving Morelia, Michoacán, 1996

María’s Great Expedition, 1995–96 Six framed photographs, map, and bilingual narrative While still a graduate student at the California Institute of the Arts, Fernandez began one of her best-known works: María’s Great Expedition. The conceptual installation chronicles the life of her maternal great-grandmother María Gonzales through a map, narrative text, and photographs. The map offers an alternative to the East-to-West narrative of American history that privileges Euro-American migration. In the images, Fernandez poses as her ancestor, recalling different photographic styles and genres in each. Deliberate anachronisms, such as a 1980s-style pocket purse worn in a photograph labeled “1919,” signal the artificiality of the scenes and emphasize the impossibility of embodying a memory.

1950, San Diego, California, 1996

María’s Great Expedition, 1995–96 Six framed photographs, map, and bilingual narrative While still a graduate student at the California Institute of the Arts, Fernandez began one of her best-known works: María’s Great Expedition. The conceptual installation chronicles the life of her maternal great-grandmother María Gonzales through a map, narrative text, and photographs. The map offers an alternative to the East-to-West narrative of American history that privileges Euro-American migration. In the images, Fernandez poses as her ancestor, recalling different photographic styles and genres in each. Deliberate anachronisms, such as a 1980s-style pocket purse worn in a photograph labeled “1919,” signal the artificiality of the scenes and emphasize the impossibility of embodying a memory.

Soldadera from Guillermina Tellez, 1995

Starline Fashion, 2000

Manuela S-T-I-T-C-H-E-D, 1996–2000 Throughout her career Fernandez has sought evocative and ethical ways to portray the lives of other people. The photographs in this series depict the nondescript facades of garment factories in Los Angeles, intentionally avoiding exploitative images of the largely immigrant female workforce inside. The furtive and unwelcoming buildings seem designed to go unnoticed, raising questions about what might be happening inside. Alongside the photographs, an embroidered text conveys a fictionalized account written from a garment worker’s perspective of an immigration raid at her workplace.

Lavanderia #1, 2002

In 2002 and 2003, Fernandez turned her camera on coin-operated laundromats in East Los Angeles. Shooting at night, she transformed brightly lit fluorescent interiors full of repetitive commercial machines into theatrical stages. The images’ long exposure times blur the activity inside while rendering the windowpanes’ smudges and graffiti tags in sharp detail. Conscious that her working-class subjects were already exposed by the laundromats’ front windows and bright lights, Fernandez affords them a measure of privacy by photographing them turned away, obscured, or indistinct.

Lavandería #11, 2002

In 2002 and 2003, Fernandez turned her camera on coin-operated laundromats in East Los Angeles. Shooting at night, she transformed brightly lit fluorescent interiors full of repetitive commercial machines into theatrical stages. The images’ long exposure times blur the activity inside while rendering the windowpanes’ smudges and graffiti tags in sharp detail. Conscious that her working-class subjects were already exposed by the laundromats’ front windows and bright lights, Fernandez affords them a measure of privacy by photographing them turned away, obscured, or indistinct.

Laura A. (Los Angeles), 2018

View from Here, 2016–18 In View from Here, Fernandez creates abstract portraits of people through depictions of how and from where they might look out onto the world. Playing with interpretations of photography as a “window,” she made images framing the California views of various historical figures and artists, including photographers Laura Aguilar and Tōyō Miyatake and sculptor Noah Purifoy. The works’ vertical orientation and shallow depth of field emphasize the non-pictured subjects, turning each into a portrait of the absent.

Toyo (Manzanar), 2016

View from Here, 2016–18 In View from Here, Fernandez creates abstract portraits of people through depictions of how and from where they might look out onto the world. Playing with interpretations of photography as a “window,” she made images framing the California views of various historical figures and artists, including photographers Laura Aguilar and Tōyō Miyatake and sculptor Noah Purifoy. The works’ vertical orientation and shallow depth of field emphasize the non-pictured subjects, turning each into a portrait of the absent.

Untitled Multiple Exposure #4 (Bravo), 1999

Fernandez’s first trip to Mexico stirred questions about her relationship to Indigeneity as a Chicana. Afterward, she re-photographed images of Indigenous women made by four canonical imagemakers who worked in Mexico: photojournalist Nacho López, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, artist and activist Tina Modotti, and art photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Fernandez then superimposed self-portraits that echo but do not exactly mimic the originals to create double portraits that waver between identification and distance. The layered works can seem uncanny or even haunted, a visual depiction of a Chicana artist exploring complicated histories of Indigeneity, Spanish colonization, and Mexican nationalism.

Untitled Multiple Exposure #8 (Modotti), 1999

Fernandez’s first trip to Mexico stirred questions about her relationship to Indigeneity as a Chicana. Afterward, she re-photographed images of Indigenous women made by four canonical imagemakers who worked in Mexico: photojournalist Nacho López, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, artist and activist Tina Modotti, and art photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Fernandez then superimposed self-portraits that echo but do not exactly mimic the originals to create double portraits that waver between identification and distance. The layered works can seem uncanny or even haunted, a visual depiction of a Chicana artist exploring complicated histories of Indigeneity, Spanish colonization, and Mexican nationalism.

Contact Sheet for Untitled Multiple Exposures, 1999

Proof for Multiple Exposures, 1999

Juan, 2017

Fernandez has been a professor at Cerritos College, a majority Latino community college in Norwalk, California, since 2000. In these photographs, former students pose in the institutional setting of the college with images they have made of their camera equipment projected onto the scenes. Fernandez’s collaboration with her students raises questions about education and mentorship, as well as making visible the diversity of people and tools contained within the identity of “photographer.”

End of Road, 2010

Sereno, 2006–10 After Fernandez had a baby, she adapted her art practice, photographing during daily walks. With her camera in hand and her son strapped in a carrier, she explored their predominantly Mexican American neighborhood in Los Angeles’s Eastside, El Sereno (“The Serene”). In images taken before, during, and after the housing foreclosure crisis of 2008, Fernandez captured signs of human activity and unhoused communities amid expanses of Southern California nature. Classical in composition, the photographs of discarded belongings and makeshift shelters reveal disquiet at the edge of suburban sprawl, hinting at lives that are anything but “serene.”

American Trailer, 2018

A travel trailer sits in a salvage yard in Riverside, California, abandoned and visibly damaged. Once symbols of leisure and mobility, trailers now also serve as long-term homes for tens of millions of Americans, especially in places with few affordable housing options. Although this photograph seems to be a single moment frozen in time, it is actually a composite of more than 30 individual images that Fernandez made over the course of months. The final work documents the vehicle’s deterioration from a place of shelter into charred metal, perhaps a metaphor for some Americans’ dreams.

Space Available #10 (Spring Studio), 2004

Space Available, 2004 A central question for Fernandez is how to sustain an artistic identity while tending to personal survival. She first began photographing her working spaces during an important transition—between her graduation from art school and her securing of a long-term teaching position. She picked the subject up again years later while moving from one studio to another, resulting in the series Space Available. The photographs amount to a visual diary of an artist’s precarious relationship with the resources she needs to work, an instability exacerbated by the competitive job and real estate markets of the early 2000s.