Profile: Photography Club

By Hector S.

Everyone has a shot at photography – that’s the mission of the first photography club at Diego Rivera.

Ms. Martinez, an English Language Development teacher and journalism teacher, started the club this year with the help of EduCare.

Ms. Martinez, who taught photography at a Los Angeles non-profit called Las Fotos Project before becoming a teacher at CATS, reached out to Jaime Vega, the senior site coordinator for EduCare before the school year started.

She said that she became interest in photography at a young age when her parents bought her a camera.

“I started taking photos of everything that was around me,” she said. “I really liked that I was able to express myself that way and I also liked to document things a lot and so photography was a way of doing that.”

She said it was her mom who inspired her love for photography. “My mom was always taking photos of us all the time, she was like documenting us every single moment,” she said. “And looking back now that I have all these photos, I realize the power of photography to preserve the past so that future generations can know what it was like, you know.”

So she wanted to do the same for students.

“My hope is that they’re able to learn how to use them properly and like the features on the camera and start taking different kinds of pictures, whether it’s people, places and what’s happening around the campus and inside the campus, but mostly so students can feel that they have a creative outlet and also so that they can know each other,” she said.

But she needed cameras to make that happen.

“So in collaboration with EduCare, we were able to help support her with purchasing cameras which were going to be doing once the students start meeting more frequently every Wednesday but that was the inspiration for the photography club to bring like a journalism program to CATS,” Jaime Vega said.  

Junior Hugo M. shared that “The thing that made me join the photography club was just because I had little experience with the industry and with the fun times I had with my friends and I just felt like I could relive that once more.” 

He said he started liking photography because it’s “really fun and interesting, like how the things you can do with a camera, you can take a picture at different angles.”

Jaime said that when he was in high school, they didn’t have a photography club. But what made him start liking photography was social media. “In the era of social media that we live in, there’s different type of photography art like portrait art, landscape, environmental art, even sports art and I am a really big sports fanatic so I like looking at like classic legendary pictures of sports athletes back in the day,” he said. ” I love seeing different pictures of Kobe and murals of him. I would say he was like my L.A hero.”

So can students take photos of the many murals and people outside the school?

“The club can take pictures outside the school just as long as it is approved by an administrator and by EduCare,” said Jaime. “We are able to take field trips sometimes, too, like going to the beach, take a hike so that way we can take pictures of nature, like nature pictures.” 

For anyone who is interested in joining the photography club, they can see Ms. Martinez in Room 105 on Wednesdays after school or they can see Jaime Vega in the college center during lunch.