Gregory Bojorquez | Interview
An interview with Gregory Bojorquez for Body & Soul
Showing: April 19th - May 17th, 2025
GGLA: What was your intention behind the images you included in this show, and how does that connect to what has been holding your interest as of late as a photographer?
GB: For this show, I wanted to use images I had never printed before. In conjunction with Andres, he picked some stuff that I had shown in different shows before, but, it dates back. It’s only got four, but all the other ones are images I’d never printed before, and I wanted
them to be images that made me feel good. Some of my photos from before were people I knew and their stories. Some backstories weren’t always good. There was some tragedy going on, and it made me feel kind of weird about the photos sometimes, even though people really liked them.
I did another show called 45 Point Blank, and the centerpiece was a five-photo series of something called Shooter Down. I photographed a shooter in Hollywood at Sunset and Vine just as he was getting confronted by LAPD. My photos are a succession of right from when he is shot, and there’s police running up the street from the other direction. There was the policeman that did the shooting next to me and, I mean, I saw the man die in front of my eyes. When I walked to the right of the street, there was a shot-up Mercedes, and there was a man inside the car who was shot. He was in bad shape and he was walked to an ambulance, but I found out he died that night. The next day, one of the images was front page of the LA Times. That made me excited, but I kind of always felt weirdly about the one victim in the Mercedes. It was just a weird incident. I’d have weird dreams about it.
At one point someone asked me if I thought I was taking advantage of the victims and I had to tell her, “Well, I take photos for a living.” I just happened to have my cameras with me that day and I was able to get those photos. Some people go to war regions on purpose to try to photograph that type of thing, and they don’t get photos like that. I happened to be in one of the most popular intersections in the world, Sunset and Vine. Who knows something like that is going to happen there? The pictures are really good, it just made me feel like I had different feelings about them. With the series I’m doing this time, they’re all photos that are - I feel good about them, there’s not shock value going on.
“There are a lot of people these days- it’s like you have to have something shocking in a photo to justify it. Sometimes, I think you just need to have photos that are strong for what they are. I don’t want them to have any kind of gimmicky type of thing going on. In this series of photos, there’s no gang member thing going on. With this body of work in this show, I feel really good about all the photos.”
- Gregory Bojorquez
GGLA: There are elements of relationships, couplings, and a lot of images of friendships involved in these images. What aspects of relationships are you capturing there? What does that mean to you?
GB: For me, that is something that I’m familiar with. When you’re a teenager, you’re involved in relationships, and they are different when you’re young, like the kids in the photos. There’s the photo of the young women and girls at The Gila River. I was there doing a story for a magazine about the casino, but at one point we went out to do a photograph there at that dam. I thought a photo of all the girls together would be really strong. I knew at that time of their lives, it was good. I mean, these girls were young and they’re still kind of naive to the realities of life. That was a long time ago, and who knows whether lives have gone since then? In the res, I always read stories about bad drug addiction and alcoholism, and women go missing. I look at that photo now and it just makes me feel good that they were in a time of their life where they’re not exposed to a lot of that reality.
GGLA: Many might say this show is a departure. You touch on parallel bodies of work, and it’s really interesting to see this range that you capture on day to day. Tell me about that. What is the importance of having this range of vision that you’ve captured over the years?
GB: People ask me, “What are you working on”, or “What sort of project are you working on?” There’s just certain things I look for. When you do it long enough, there are photos that start coming together. I’ve been scanning some photos from the late 90s, early 2000s. You look at Third Street in East LA and there’s no train tracks there, and there’s other photos of places that are gone. That becomes a project in itself, how things are different, perspectives are different.
I took a photo of the Las Palmas Hotel when I was living in Hollywood from the parking lots that were behind Musso & Frank and Las Palmas, the club Las Palmas. Now those are all high-rise buildings, you can no longer take that photo anymore of the Las Palmas hotel with the hotel site.
So, that becomes a project. I’ll see a group of kids waiting by the liquor store, waiting for somebody to buy them alcohol, and I photographed that. Then the kids at the Roxy at a music venue or a show. The youth of that parallels each other.
You could have on a roll of 35 millimeter- or if you’re shooting digital on your card, you could have 20 photos of one thing and then one photo of another thing. Maybe that one photo goes with a project and it just all comes together. I think sometimes it’s good to have in mind to photograph of a particular subject, but maybe then you’ll be limiting yourself to what you’re photographing.
I did a project called Eastiders and it was all people on the east, what I consider the east side of LA, from as high as Highland Park, down to Commerce and as far east as Pico Rivera or something, and I would just concentrate on those areas. But maybe if I would have tried to venture out, I could have been shooting something else. I kind of was, but my whole thing with shooting that project was I wanted it to be spontaneous and I didn’t want to set up photo shoots with people. I wanted the spontaneity so bad that I would not attempt to say “Hey, I want to photograph you. let’s meet here and we’ll photograph there.” I never did that. But you know, I could have done that, and then it would have been like some other project.
GGLA: What’s that like in socializing? How does that leave an impression on you?
GB: I think people are more accepting now of getting their photos taken. Every phone has a camera and people take selfies of themselves. Photography is a lot more popular now.
I think some people want their picture taken. At one time, if you had a camera, people would be like, “Wow, you have a camera”. Some people would be suspicious of you having a camera, and some people would just not even want their picture taken. Some people wouldn’t be very nice about it. You either had to hangout a long time so people feel comfortable with you at your camera or you just had to ask over and over again. When I was a younger guy, it was different, I’m not as young anymore. I feel kind of awkward just like asking people to take their photo, even though it’s so common now. The more you do it, I think the easier it gets you get different reactions.
GGLA: One thing that I appreciate about your works is that you do have this range, whether it be commercial or an artistic practice. I’m enthralled by your ability to capture the spontaneity behind a moment. How does spontaneity work for you?
GB: I don’t know. I think some people are always shooting everything. But I think sometimes you need to just observe people. Sometimes people ask “Where is your camera?” I’ll say, “Well, I don’t have my camera today.” You observe people and you study people. Sometimes I like to remember things as they happened. Some of these moments do happen again. Maybe it’ll just take me a couple more photos. If you just start taking all kinds of photos, people are aware that you’re taking photos and then it’s become something different.
GGLA: In your observation of people and capturing this sort of moment, it seems like you’re anticipating things too. You’re able to see things.
GB: Yeah, sometimes you’re anticipation is true, but most times, it’s going to be something else. Like I said, you think you’ve captured a great moment and then way later when you look at the film, you missed it. But the more you do it, you can get it.
GGLA: You’re very mindful of the material that you’re using. It’s not an endless roll of film. What is it like when you’re waiting for a moment?
GB: That level of patience came from when I first started taking pictures when I was a teenager. I took a class in high school and the first camera we used was a four by five. So we had to shoot one sheet of film at a time, and everything had to be perfect. That carried on into medium format and 35 millimeter. I wanted to take pictures that were good, I didn’t want to just shoot everything. So I think in doing that, what I was doing was training my eye. It’s kind of weird thing to say.
I think what’s happening now with digital, because you could just shoot everything, it’s like some people are just photographing so much and just trying to get everything. They’re not really training their eye. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know.
I like the subject matter to be right. After that everything in the frame has to look good because if something’s off in the frame, it’s not going to be a good picture. If it’s not gonna be a good picture, then why take it? But a lot of people do that anyway. I used to hate when we started going into digital from film, for work. There’s a lot of stuff you have to do digitally for work that you don’t have the option to shoot film. People would say, “Oh, well, we’ll just fix it and post. We’ll just fix it in post.” And I say well, “I don’t wanna fix it in post.” I want to get it right the way I want it to look.
GGLA: You’re very mindful of the material that you’re using. It’s not an endless roll of film. What is it like when you’re waiting for a moment?
GB: That level of patience came from when I first started taking pictures when I was a teenager. I took a class in high school and the first camera we used was a four by five. So we had to shoot one sheet of film at a time, and everything had to be perfect. That carried on into medium format and 35 millimeter. I wanted to take pictures that were good, I didn’t want to just shoot everything. So I think in doing that, what I was doing was training my eye. It’s kind of weird thing to say.
I think what’s happening now with digital, because you could just shoot everything, it’s like some people are just photographing so much and just trying to get everything. They’re not really training their eye. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know.
I like the subject matter to be right. After that everything in the frame has to look good because if something’s off in the frame, it’s not going to be a good picture. If it’s not gonna be a good picture, then why take it? But a lot of people do that anyway. I used to hate when we started going into digital from film, for work. There’s a lot of stuff you have to do digitally for work that you don’t have the option to shoot film. People would say, “Oh, well, we’ll just fix it and post. We’ll just fix it in post.” And I say well, “I don’t wanna fix it in post.” I want to get it right the way I want it to look.
GGLA: What do these memories make you feel, and how has that shaped the presentation of your work publicly?
GB: When I first showed the Eastiders work, there were stories about some of the photos that are really good memories. Like the first time I did a show with Bene Teschan. We did it in Berlin and the the photograph of the the two little baseball players at City Terrace Park - I mean, that gives me a feeling like when I was a boy and I played Little League baseball, it was the best time in my life. I watched Bad News Bears and it made me cry. Fucking movie. Just the the memory of playing Little League and looking at that photo, it makes it very special for me.
In the same show, there was a photo of a girl on the pay phone and no one knows the backstory. That same girl on the pay phone, she was murdered by her boyfriend and found in a fucking suitcase in her house. Looking at the picture, I just wonder if she was talking to that guy who killed her on the phone, her name was Noel. Another photo in the show is my friend Bogart’s grave sight, he was violently murdered. I think when I did that first show, it was mentally a lot for me.
There’s stuff in my Eastider’s book, it’s just really personal because of how I knew these people, and knowing their stories, it’s really affected me. Some would say “Hey, you seem very emotionally invested” and well, the thing with the baseball kids- it’s just like Orson Wells when he did that Citizen Kane movie and Kane drops the snow globe and says, Rosebud. Rosebud was his youth.
