©Emilene Orozco, The Weight Of A Dollar

I am so honored that the Los Angeles Center of Photography created The Aline Smithson Next Generation Award in my name, to honor my 25-year legacy of teaching with the organization. The award is driven by their mission to remove barriers for entry into creative expression, as LACP continues to deepen its commitment to empower and promote emerging, female identified photographic artists based in Los Angeles. The annual winner is invited to to create a solo project to be exhibited at LACP and receive membership and professional development support. I am thrilled to announce the 2025 recipient, Emilene Orozco. The 2024 Awardee was Stephanie Shih.

Orozco draws on her Mexican heritage to create visual narratives that center marginalized voices and examine the complexities of visibility, power, and cultural memory.​​​​​​​ Orozco’s work begins with the photographic image and extends across disciplines to articulate intimate stories that highlight the sacrifices of those who remain undervalued in American life.

The work that Orozco is exhibiting considers comparisons of the Los Angeles Japanese and Latino populations, each faced or are facing incarcerations, raids, detention and deportation. Both populations share particular similarities–working as gardeners and keeping cultural legacies alive through food and family.

Opening this Saturday, November 22nd, from 4 – 6pm, Orozco’s show will accompany the exhibition, Glowing Earth: A Century of Photography, Immigration and Resilience in Little Tokyo. Curated by Dr. Rotem Rozental, Los Angeles Center of Photography Executive Director and Chief Curator, the artists included are Flora Kao, Toto Miyatake, Mike Saijo, and Chikashi Tanaka. As LACP sits in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, this project begins with Little Tokyo and the photo-based artists that defined its creative genealogy, seeking to outline their impact on artists today, in the neighborhood and beyond. Such stories are interwoven with the creative fabric of Little Tokyo, and, more broadly, to the histories of immigrant communities in Downtown, South and East LA. Glowing Earth also highlights their reciprocal creative relationship and the ways in which such artists reflect on belonging, intergenerational and cross cultural connections. The exhibition runs through Jan 10, 2026.

© Emilene Orozco, The Labyrinth of Labor, 2025

I first discovered Orozco’s work when jurying hundreds of portfolios for the Lenscratch Student Prize Awards. Her project, Invisible Labor, was selected as a Top 25 Best Student Portfolios by almost twenty significant jurors.

She states for Invisible Labor:

As a first-generation Mexican American artist, I create work that honors the unseen labor and generational resilience that shaped my upbringing. My project Invisible Labor is a visual reflection of the immigrant workforce, particularly those whose hands build, clean, and feed this country, yet are rarely acknowledged. Through staged photographs, textile references, and poetic symbolism, I aim to humanize those rendered invisible by systems of exploitation.

This work is deeply personal. My father worked in the fields of California, and my mother has held various domestic jobs. Their stories, sacrifices, and silences are embedded in each image. I approach photography not just as a tool for documentation, but as a space for resistance and reclamation, where I can stage scenes that reframe power, dignity, and cultural memory.

I hope this series encourages viewers to pause and consider the labor behind everyday conveniences. My goal is to continue creating work that speaks to community, challenges harmful narratives, and offers space for healing. Receiving this opportunity would further affirm the importance of centering stories often left out of mainstream visual culture.

© Emilene Orozco, For Sale, (Se Vende)

Emilene Orozco (b. 1992) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose photography incorporates sculptural objects and staged scenes to explore themes of labor, immigration, and cultural identity. Drawing from her Mexican heritage and working-class background, her work reflects on invisibility, dignity, and the unseen systems that shape immigrant life in the United States.

She earned her BFA in Photography from California State University, Long Beach in 2025. Her work has been recognized with the Aline Smithson Next Generation Award and was selected for the Lenscratch Top 25 Student Prize. Her image, Invisible Labor, was recently featured in Lenscratch’s international student showcase.

Emilene’s practice combines documentary and conceptual strategies, staging poetic, object-based photographs that utilize materials such as gloves, bricks, textiles, and currency. These constructed scenes reveal the labor and sacrifice that often go unnoticed in dominant narratives.

She has exhibited at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Irvine Fine Arts Center, and Brea Gallery. She is currently preparing for her solo exhibition at the Los Angeles Center of Photography this fall.

Instagram: @emilenephoto

Portrait of Emilene Orozco

Can you share the genesis of your exhibition that opens tomorrow at the Los Angeles Center of Photography? 

My working title is Watching History Return. It came from thinking about how care and labor often happen quietly, and how people continue tending to spaces and histories even when they are not fully seen or acknowledged. It feels true to this series because so much of the work is about holding and preserving something, even without full permission or visibility. The title is simple, but it carries the weight of that ongoing effort. 

This work began when I realized I was no longer just learning about history. I was watching it return. 

In recent months., I have witnessed ICE raids unfold near my home, only a few blocks from Little Tokyo. A neighborhood that once held Japanese Americans during World War II incarceration now sits beside a detention site affecting my own community. Seeing this brought an unsettling clarity. Making this work became a way of not staying silent. 

I look at how visibility and erasure show up in everyday landscapes. While photographing lawns in Crenshaw, I searched for quiet traces of Japanese people who rebuilt their lives there after incarceration, and for the ways Hispanic landscapers today continue to care for those same spaces with dedication, often without recognition. Irrigation patterns shaping grass, uneven soil where bodies once moved, and rooted plants that persist underground guide how I see the land and what it remembers. I think often about who maintains a space and who is allowed to belong to it. 

Rather than depicting pain directly, my work turns toward what remains. I am drawn to resilience expressed through routine, through repair, and through acts of care that often go unnoticed. I work with photography, installation, and sculptural elements to reflect how labor and memory settle quietly into surfaces and structures long after harm is no longer visible. 

Watching history return has taught me that what we call progress sometimes grows from buried fractures. It does not always come back loudly. It settles into walls, rises through foliage, and hides just beneath the surface of a perfectly maintained lawn. 

©Emilene Orozco, Two Sides of the Table, 2025

Congratulations on the Next Generation Award! Tell us how receiving this award has impacted your artistic practice. 

Receiving the Next Generation Award came at a time when I was quietly questioning whether my work, and even my path as an artist, was truly being understood. The recognition felt like an invitation to keep going. It confirmed that connecting archival histories with contemporary immigrant experiences resonates beyond academic spaces. Since then, I have felt more confident taking conceptual risks and experimenting with scale and materials. More than anything, it reminded me that my role as an artist is not just to represent my community but to continue expanding how we see and speak about immigration, resilience, and labor as a whole. I am deeply grateful and more determined than ever to continue expanding my work. 

©Emilene Orozco, Lawn Series #1, 2025

How did you come to consider the lives and histories of Japanese immigrants in relation to your own family’s immigrant experience? 

I grew up near Little Tokyo without fully realizing how much history was still living in that neighborhood. It was not until the ICE raids and protests nearby, right by the federal detention center that stands there today, that I began to recognize the parallels. It was unsettling and hard to ignore. The same area that once saw the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II now, generations later, faces the detention of another immigrant community just a few blocks away. 

Learning about Japanese history did not feel like studying the past of another group. It felt like uncovering an earlier version of what many of us continue to live through today. Since then, I have started seeing everyday spaces differently. Lawns, fences, and familiar streets read to me like quiet records of what has been endured and what keeps resurfacing. That realization changed how I make work. I create with a stronger sense of responsibility now, paying attention to traces of presence in places where it is often overlooked or erased. 

©Emilene Orozco, Fruit of Our Labor,

What commonalities have you discovered? 

What I have discovered is that both Japanese and Latino immigrant communities have contributed so much to this country while still being treated as outsiders within it. In both histories, labor becomes a means of survival but also a source of invisibility. I have noticed a shared pattern of tending to land, homes, and gardens, and maintaining spaces that they were rarely granted full belonging to. I recognize this deeply because I grew up watching my own family hold spaces together quietly, often through work that went unnoticed. In both communities, resilience is taught through action rather than words. Cultural practices, family care, and small, daily gestures become ways of staying visible to ourselves even when society tries to render us invisible. What connects them most, to me, is the preservation of dignity through labor. It is not a loud resistance, but a steady one. 

©Emilene Orozco, Strinds attached, 2025, Mixed Media

Such a brilliant idea to create a surveillance camera piñata…are you filling it with anything in particular? 

I spent a lot of time debating what should go inside and brainstorming ideas. Although the piñata is currently empty, I do plan to fill it in the near future. I want the contents to speak to the kinds of labor and daily realities that are often overlooked. I am considering placing small symbolic objects, like tiny work gloves, toy fruit, pieces of fencing, and crumpled dollar bills. I am also thinking of adding confetti printed with real ICE statistics and immigration data. 

My intention is that when the piñata is broken open, it functions less as a moment of celebration and more as a brief act of exposure. What is usually hidden or ignored comes into view all at once. In that moment, I hope what spills out is not only what has been suppressed, but also a recognition that it was carried with strength. 

©Emilene Orozco, Lawn Series #6

Congratulations also on your recent BFA….what do young artist’s need to stay focused and engaged? 

Thank you. I think staying focused as a young artist has less to do with strict discipline and more to do with staying connected to why you began making work in the first place. There is constant pressure to prove yourself, especially through productivity or visibility, and it can pull you toward performing instead of reflecting. What has helped me most is protecting time away from social media comparisons and giving myself room to experiment without needing immediate results. 

I also believe artists need environments where ideas can be tested without fear of being reduced. Having mentors and honest conversations has made a difference for me, as well as knowing when to step back from spaces that make me shrink. I think it is also important to stay observant of what is happening around you, whether in your community or in everyday life. Art does not always need to respond loudly, but it can quietly carry awareness forward and make space for necessary conversations. Engagement comes from curiosity, not from perfection. Sometimes the most important thing is simply continuing to show up for the work, even quietly. 

©Emilene Orozco, Rooted Offering, 2025

What’s next for you? 

I am so excited for my first artist residency at Blue Roof Studios in Spring 2026. It will take place in South Los Angeles, the community I am from, and being able to deepen this work from within that space feels meaningful to me. I look forward to having dedicated time to experiment, reflect, and let the project evolve. I also plan to continue learning through new art classes and different mediums as a way to keep growing both technically and conceptually. 

©Emilene Orozco, Lawn Series #8

©Emilene Orozco, Installation Photo

©Emilene Orozco, Installation Photo

©Emilene Orozco, Installation Photo

©Emilene Orozco, Installation Photo

©Emilene Orozco, Installation Photo

About the expanded exhibition,  Glowing Earth: A Century of Photography, Immigration and Resilience in Little Tokyo

Curatorial Research Assistant: Nicole Coriaty

The artistic community in pre-WWII Little Tokyo was crucial for the shaping of SoCal’s art histories and visual culture. Japanese artists have come together to form collectives, clubs and professional associations, mount exhibitions and launch commercial ventures. While doing so, they chronicled the changing cityscape and the Japanese American community, and have also captured a specific view of California; of concrete and emotional landscapes, experiences of immigration, assimilation, rejection and acceptance. This project therefore begins with Little Tokyo and the photo-based artists that defined its creative genealogy, seeking to outline their impact on artists today, in the neighborhood and beyond.

LACP moved to a new location in October 2023, nestled between Little Tokyo and the Toy District, between the craftsmen, wholesale retailers and the legacy shaped by groundbreaking artists, whose corpus was devalued (and in many ways disregarded) until recent decades.

The street Toyo Miyatake Way is located at the end of our block, a tribute to a photographic pioneer whose work and community involvement changed photography in Los Angeles and, more broadly, the ways in which the American West was captured and imagined. Miyatake owned a photography studio in Little Tokyo and was a prominent member of the artists’ collective Shak-udo-sha, meaning “Glowing Earth society.” Miyatake is credited with supporting Edward Weston and organizing his first exhibition, and his family still runs a photo studio in San Gabriel.

Mike Saijo has been preserving and excavating the photographic histories of Little Tokyo, while adding contemporary vistas of the area and its people. His project includes a collaboration with the estate of Chakashi Tanaka, showing rarely seen glass negatives from the 1920s, scanned and reprinted with artist Yvette Marthell, alongside his recent series of trade cards that focus on Little Tokyo.

Flora Kao’s cyanotypes nod toward local visual histories, community ritual and the histories of photographic practice, while highlighting the role of shared myth for the shaping of communities and collective voices.

Such stories are interwoven with the creative fabric of Little Tokyo, and, more broadly, to the histories of immigrant communities in Downtown, South and East LA. Glowing Earth also highlights their reciprocal creative relationship and the ways in which such artists reflect on belonging, intergenerational and cross cultural connections.