LOUIE VILLANUEVA - EXPOSURE EMERGING PHOTOGRAPHERS SHOWCASE

'I Had Wished I Was White' recounts Louie Villanueva's passage between two cultures—one of his family and one of his peers, detailed by photographs of his parents, food, and settler colonial lifestyles in Canada made over a decade. The images detail specific moments in Villanueva's journey, expressing a universal struggle with identity formation. The practice of making photographs provided a third way to tackle growing up, and this selection reveals this unconscious thread throughout his life.

'I Had Wished I Was White' is a clear title with personal imagery that gives language to a seldom expressed but commonly experienced feeling of pressure. The photographs demand recognition and engender empathy.

BIOGRAPHY

Louie Villanueva (b. 1995) is a photographer based in Moh'kins'tsis, located on Treaty 7 territory—also called Calgary, Canada.

Born to parents of Filipino descent—Villanueva explores identity, poetry and prose, and the dialectic of art and craft. A fascination with mindfulness—intermingles with philosophies of art and manifests in a way of seeing applied to everyday activities, formal portraiture, and walking.

A background in photojournalism, event and studio photography provide a base for Villanueva’s examination of form and subject. His devotion to the medium together with an autobiographical approach to work give him generous mechanisms to communicate with.

Villanueva is the photography technician for the University of Calgary Department of Art and Art History, peddles the tools of the trade at The Camera Store, documents weddings for Light Theory, and operates Neat Film Lab.