M M, c. 1978, printed 2022

John Valadez’s East Los Angeles Urban Portrait portfolio sits at the crossroads of portraiture and street photography. Valadez stopped his subjects on the street while they were waiting for the bus, carrying groceries, or hanging out and invited them to pose for the camera. Some of the photographs’ titles include their subjects’ names, while in others Valadez included street names referring to the location where the photograph was shot, suggesting a kind of anthropology. At the time, Valadez’s primary artistic occupation was photo-based painting. He was committed to depicting people in his immediate surroundings in downtown and East LA, particularly Chicanx Angelenos like himself. Valadez ultimately determined that the photographs on view here could not be improved by rendering them in paint, so he published them as a photographic portfolio. They stand as documents of his community and testaments to its worthiness of aesthetic consideration and memorialization.