LACMA

attempts to experience the other's otherness. In one sense, Montoya shoots tourists against environments that have already been constructed to suit their expectations; like a tourist returned home, she places these images of noncontiguous spaces in direct relationship with each other. In using a post- card installation that requires interaction to reconstruct a narrative experience, Shooting the Tourist suggests a certain similarity between the tourist and art viewer while it raises a question about Montoya's own location as photographer. In Sed: A Trail of Thirst (2004), Montoya follows the migrant path across Arizona's Sonora Desert, documenting the abandoned campsites and discarded items of those who have crossed the border into the United States, as well as the isolated water stations placed by the organization Humane Borders. In this series, in stark contrast to her earlier work, the sense of social and cultural space is depicted through the absence of people. Montoya documents material traces—rather than social portraits—in order to get at the hidden history and experiences behind the considerable demographic changes in the United States. Her digital panoramic landscapes both participate in and challenge the tradition of landscape photography for the Southwest, but they also resonate with the depopulated urban landscapes of such photographers as Christina Fernandez (also in this exhibition), Anthony Hernandez, and Catherine Opie. —CHON A. NORIEGA Delilah Montoya is an artist identified with the Chicano art movement; in fact, she is the only individual artist in this exhibition who also appears in Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, a groundbreaking survey of that movement that traveled nationally from 1990 to 1993. (The art group Asco is also included in both exhibitions.) As a photographer, Montoya is also identified with New Mexico, although she was born in Texas and raised in the Midwest before settling in the ancestral home of her mother's family. Montoya works in both documentary and staged photography, moving between these modes in order to challenge viewers' expectations about the subject matter. Her photographs explore social types (penitentes, prisoners, tourists, female boxers, and urban youth), spiritual and mythical figures (the Virgin of Guadalupe, the ghostly figure known as La Llorona, and Doña Sebastiana, the angel of death), and cultural forms (Aztec codices and the Sacred Heart). According to art historian Holly Barnet- Sánchez, "Her work is grounded in the mestizo/a experience of the Southwest and borderlands, bringing together a multiplicity of syncretic forms and practices." Montoya works in photographic series that allow her to explore the persistence of vernacular traditions, the emergence of cultural hybridity, and the residues of social conflict. Her series involve considerable research, but the photographs them- selves are driven by a combination of documentary techniques and narrative presentation. In fact, while these series signal an engagement with Chicano culture as their subject matter, they are at the same time deeply engaged with the history and historical forms of photography itself. As art historian Jennifer González notes, "Montoya demonstrates an interest in the construction of cultural identity as well as the role of the camera in this process." In this way, Montoya grounds her series in the medium and its history (she uses printing processes that range from collotype to digital imaging), making her work self-reflexive and conceptual among those exploring similar topics in a more ethnographic mode. In Shooting the Tourist (1993), Montoya photographed tourists at various sites in New Mexico and California, arranging her prints into accordion-fold postcard series that reveal the common activities bridging these different spaces. These black-and- white snapshots, taken with a wide-angle lens, draw attention to the surreal nature of the objective gaze of both tourists and documentary photography—as each 173 DELILAH MONTOYA

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