Monse Guajardo is a Mexican-American photographer who lives and works within the United States/Mexico border region. Over the past 6 years since picking up her first camera, she’s focused on portrait and editorial photography professionally, while creating documentary narratives in her personal practice, developing an interest in creating images as explorations of the human condition. She seeks to find moments that unveil feelings and experiences that her “protagonists” are seeking to find themselves, using photography as a vessel to carry on this mission. The duality in her upbringing has characterized her photographic aesthetic and been an underlying motivation for the stories she captures. Guajardo is often inspired by Mexico's nature, colors, textures, and domestic scenes. With a focus on portrait and documentary photography styles, she creates imagery that seeks to explore the interconnection between these two genres in a compelling way. Her personal practice takes form through intimate portraits with a strong focus on the environment, often taking up collage art that includes artifacts from the images location.
In 2018 she had her first solo exhibition, “Identity Collapse”, in Laredo, Texas, recounting the aftermath of a broken relationship and her personal struggle to find self-identity. She has been selected to be a part of “Memory Map” a group exhibition in Houston, Texas by Hardy & Nance Studios this March 2024 and was recently awarded the 22nd Julia Margaret Cameron Award in three different categories (Documentary/Reportage, Digital Manipulation/Collage, and Open Theme); with several works to be exhibited in Barcelona, Spain, in April 2025. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Dazed Magazine, and Pitchfork.
