Transformation, Identity & Rainbow Socks
For Jackelyn Bracamontes, winner of the #NewVisions2021 student photo competition from Create Forever partner Texas Photographic Society, photography has been more than just a creative outlet
Photo 2022 © Jackelyn Bracamontes | FUJIFILM X-E4 and FUJINON XF27mmF2.8 R WR, 1/125 sec at F7.1, ISO 200
The first time Mexican-American artist Jackelyn Bracamontes held a camera was in the sixth grade. Her teacher had handed out one-time-use cameras for a class project. Plastic and cardboard magic-maker in hand, Jackelyn created her first-ever series of self-portraits. When she saw the way her photos came out, she was hooked.
“I just fell in love with it,” Jackelyn says. “I wanted to have a camera in my hands all the time.”
Over the next six years, her life was filled with turmoil and change. She moved a lot, attending 11 different schools in both the US and Mexico before graduating high school. When she was 15, she moved to Mexico, but struggled to adjust and took distance-learning courses to keep up with education.
“It was a really small town,” she says. “Most people just dropped out of school. My mom didn’t want that for me, so I moved to Texas to live with my aunt for a year. Then my dad was able to get housing in Odessa and my whole family moved there.”
For a while, life was one of constant adjustment, adaptation, and reinvention. Her living situation, school, and friend groups were constantly changing, and she had to change with them to survive.
Photo 2022 © Jackelyn Bracamontes | FUJIFILM X-E4 and FUJINON XF27mmF2.8 R WR, 1/125 sec at F7.1, ISO 200
Photo 2022 © Jackelyn Bracamontes | FUJIFILM X-E4 and FUJINON XF27mmF2.8 R WR, 1/125 sec at F6.4, ISO 200
Photo 2022 © Jackelyn Bracamontes | FUJIFILM X-E4 and FUJINON XF27mmF2.8 R WR, 1/125 sec at F6.4, ISO 200
During the years a young person typically finds themselves, she was constantly adapting to fit into the next school, the next crowd. But through it all, she had her camera and sense of curiosity. Art and image making became Jackelyn’s way of finding joy amid the chaos.
She photographed her everyday life with her cell phone, took film photography courses, and learned to develop in a darkroom. Then she got a digital camera and taught herself how to edit images, to continue building her craft.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” she laughs. “I didn’t know what shutter speed was, what an f-stop was. I just went around photographing stuff – and I was loving it.”
By the time she enrolled in a community college in Odessa, Texas, Jackelyn’s skills were solidifying, and her talent was becoming more apparent. During freshman year, she took a photography course taught by Texas Photographic Society (TPS) board member, Steve Goff. When Goff encouraged her to apply to a TPS mobile phone photography show called Beyond the Camera, she jumped at the chance.
“I got in,” she says. “I was super excited, and started applying to every photography opportunity that came up.”
Photo 2022 © Jackelyn Bracamontes | FUJIFILM X-E4 and FUJINON XF27mmF2.8 R WR, 1/500 sec at F2.8, ISO 500
Pandemic Socks
By 2021, Jackelyn was a ceramics major at Texas State University – exploring and expanding her artistic practice across mediums. But with the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns in full swing, she had to think outside the box with both where and how to make her art.
“It was my first time living in my own apartment, away from my family,” she says. “School shut down and I was stuck. My bedroom and nature became the perfect places to take pictures because they were the only places I was really allowed to be.”
Ever introspective, yet playful, she started a photo series called The Sock Project, featuring self-portraits of herself wearing the same pairs of rainbow or bright orange socks.
“I started photographing with those socks every day,” explains Jackelyn. “I had two rules: first, it had to be fun; second, I had to edit out my body.”
Socks under a ghost-like sheet; socks under the kitchen table; socks curled beneath a blanket and hands knitting a cascading scarf. In each image of the series, Jackelyn’s body has been neatly removed from existence, an eerie absence over disembodied legs in increasingly more surrealist photos. Rainbow socks and sweatpant legs riding a dinosaur statue in a snowy park; sticking out of a couch Wicked Witch of the East-style, as if a person were buried beneath the cushions; multiplied into a dozen pairs of socks in a room populated by body-less limbs in various action poses. And then one idea even grander and zanier than the rest.
“I went out and bought 100 yellow balloons – because, why not? Then I turned on Star Wars, filled my bathtub with balloons, got in and took a photo.”
In the photo, Jackelyn’s bare legs, bedecked by the now-familiar pair of brightly colored socks, kick in the air from a tub crowded with yellow balloons – a dancer drowning in a sea of inflated joy.
Photo 2022 © Jackelyn Bracamontes | FUJIFILM X-E4 and FUJINON XF27mmF2.8 R WR, 1/500 sec at F2.8, ISO 500
Photo 2022 © Jackelyn Bracamontes | FUJIFILM X-E4 and FUJINON XF27mmF2.8 R WR, 1/60 sec at F2.8, ISO 1600
Photo 2022 © Jackelyn Bracamontes | FUJIFILM X-E4 and FUJINON XF27mmF2.8 R WR, 1/60 sec at F2.8, ISO 1600
“Who Am I?”
At first glance, it all seems silly – just fun, goofy, edited images with little beneath the surface. But a closer look and a conversation with Jackelyn reveals much more.
“It was all grappling with the question of identity,” she explains. “This whole process of photographing myself started with me wondering ‘who am I?’, and then the question became ‘how does anyone know who they are?’”
In each playful self-portrait, Jackelyn edited her own body out of the photo – uncomfortable with displaying herself, even in a self-portrait.
“People don’t question their identities until they have to transform,” Jackelyn says. “I’ve had this life of constant transformation. I never knew who I was because I was never in a place long enough to explore that. I was constantly having to adapt to new environments.”
The photo series became a way of grappling with the turmoil of her history, a medium for exploring identity through playful artistry.
“That’s the way I cope with life,” she asserts. “I’m really goofy and just want to have fun. Nobody gets to live a life devoid of pain, so I’m going to address my pain with gratitude and joy. That’s the goal.”
In the end, the photo with the balloons in the tub won the Grand Prize in #NewVisions2021 – the annual open-themed collegiate student photo competition from TPS. Jackelyn was awarded FUJIFILM X-E4 and FUJINON XF27mmF2.8 R WR.
“The first thing I did was make a sock photo,” Jackelyn laughs.
Faced with overwhelming piles of laundry, she set the new camera on a tripod in her apartment, hurled the piles of laundry into the air, made a self-portrait using the FUJIFILM Camera Remote app’s self-release button, and combined multiple frames to create a single image featuring a monstrous, airborne laundry mound.
“Why do laundry when you can make art out of it?” she insists.
Photo 2022 © Jackelyn Bracamontes | FUJIFILM X-E4 and FUJINON XF27mmF2.8 R WR, 1/40 sec at F2.8, ISO 1600
Keep Doing the Work
Over time, Jackelyn has become more comfortable in her own skin. X-E4 in hand, she has even begun including her whole body in her self-portraiture.
“By linking my X-E4 to the FUJIFILM Camera Remote app I can use my phone as the viewfinder,” she says. “It’s been super helpful for my self-portrait work. It makes the process a lot easier because I don’t have to set a timer or have a remote and run back and forth.”
These days, Jackelyn is still making art. After graduation, she landed a gig as a photographer for an RV company. She brings her X-E4 out into nature and makes images of trees and turtles. She crochets socks. She creates.
“I’m just going to keep doing the work. I’m in this never-ending process, always making something. But whatever I make is inevitably going to transform and change to become something new again.”
And so will she – the art will help her get there.
Selections for the Texas Photographic Society #NewVisions2023 collegiate student photo competition will be announced soon, so stay tuned to the website here. Winners will receive cash prizes and a FUJIFILM X-T30 II camera with FUJINON XF18-55mmF2.8-4 R LM OIS lens.
Photo 2022 © Jackelyn Bracamontes | FUJIFILM X-E4 and FUJINON XF27mmF2.8 R WR, 1/40 sec at F2.8, ISO 1600
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