Encounter Diana Solís

Diana Solís is a creative documenter and champion of her community through word, art, and, most of all, photography. She’s a friend and photographer of many poets as well as a poet herself. Originally from Monterrey, Mexico, Solís came to Chicago with her family when she was an infant in 1956. Solís’s family settled in Pilsen, one of the key ports-of-entry communities in Chicago. Her commitment to artistic expression started there and stretches across four-and-a-half decades.

Solís refers to her style as “environmental portraiture,” and one of her most memorable sessions was photographing rising literary star Sandra Cisneros during her bohemian “writer’s garret” period. The resulting crisp black-and-white photographs made the cover and interior pages of the groundbreaking 1981 premier issue of Third Woman: Of Latinas in the Midwest, a publication of Indiana University Bloomington’s Chicano-Riqueño Studies department (now called the Latino Studies Program). Solís’s personal reflection on becoming one of the first photographers to document Cisneros and other key Chicana literary figures was recently included as part of the program booklet for Cisneros’s Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Fuller Award Ceremony, held in 2021. In it, she writes:

Photographing Sandra was easy. We had a good rapport. She trusted me with my camera and I trusted her to let me know what she was comfortable with. It was implicit. We really didn’t have to say much. A rare thing.... 

Over the years, I kept in touch with Sandra and photographed her many times. In those early days while she still lived in Chicago, and when we were hanging out with friends and other writers and at different cultural events, I always had my camera with me.

Solís’s photography exploration started with a gift: a classic Kodak Instamatic, given to her by her mother, Esperanza. Fortunately, Solís’s parents supported her varied interests as a teen and, according to Solís, her father, Enrique, was a natural “cool role model.” He worked as a Rock Island railroad machinist and admired the arts; after work he made time to take his children to museums, exhibitions, and libraries. Her father also loved music and took young Solís and her siblings with him to buy record albums at his favorite place, Jazz Record Mart. Solís also noted that her father was an avid reader who occasionally bought books for his own modest home library, including poetry. Enrique enjoyed reciting poetry in Spanish and also wrote a few poems. But it was Solís who went furthest with poetry when she started performing her own work in the eighties. She participated in readings at La Décima Musa and bookstores and bar venues in Chicago’s Pilsen, Lincoln Park, and “hip” Wicker Park neighborhoods. Most notably, she was included in the 1998 Tia Chucha Press bilingual anthology, Shards of  Light/Astillas de Luz, edited by Olivia Maciel.

After the August ’68 clash between Chicago police and anti–Vietnam War demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention, protests exploded across the nation. In Chicago’s Mexican American neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village, Harrison High School protestors also hit the streets. Chicano students demanded Mexican American teachers and counselors be hired and Chicano studies be included in their curriculum. These events sparked Solís to begin her own investigation into Mexican history while still in high school in 1971. As a result, she began to frequent events at El Centro de la Causa on Halsted Street between 16th and 17th Streets. A few years later, Solís enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, but took numerous retreats from classroom engagement to find and keep jobs. With persistence, she earned her BFA on a protracted schedule. Solís’s first professional woman mentor was the late Professor Esther Parada, a key figure in the School of Art and Design. Parada was keenly in tune with Latin American aesthetics and social movements, and her theoretical writings and guidance made an impact on Solís as she explored her own Mexican community. Professor Parada helped her navigate the red tape as an undergraduate in securing a coveted fellowship as one of the first women of color to be part of the Summer Research Opportunity Program.

In the mid-seventies, while in her early twenties, Solís deepened her photography skills while teaching a beginners’ workshop at Latino Youth Alternative High School. It was there that she developed a long-lasting friendship with Sandra Cisneros, who was an English teacher at this innovative school. Later, in 1979, Solís also offered standard darkroom film development photography classes at the Chicana feminist organization Mujeres Latinas en Acción, near the activist hub Casa Aztlan, on South Racine in Pilsen. Thanks to her degree, Solís was hired by local community and city-wide newspapers to document everything from anti–Border Patrol demonstrations and small businesses’ ribbon cuttings to the aftermath of burnt barrio homes. In the early eighties, Solís’s photojournalism included some of the gay and lesbian Pride gatherings in “Boy’s Town.”

In 1985, seeking new opportunities in Mexico City, Solís soon found a job with a popular television station. She quickly soured on the prospects of making starlets the subject of her talents, and she found the working rules and atmosphere unpleasant, so she left. Throughout the nineties Solís traveled in Europe and the US, with Chicago as her home base, where she worked on a variety of assignments as an artist-in-residence. During this time, Solís also took author photos for a few poets published by March Abrazo Press, where I was an editor.

In the 2000s, Solis pursued painting, cartoons, and illustrations, particularly several fantasy figures and creatures of her imagination. She also worked with gradations of color in abstract landscapes. As a consequence of this new focus in her work and her various travels, many thousands of photo negatives and slides became part of her “buried” archives that went into storage for two decades. Only in 2017, with the help of artist and activist professor Nicole Marroquin of the School of the Art Institute, did her materials begin to get cataloged. The rescue process continues. The results of this effort will add to Solís’s current and future projects documenting artists and writers and the lives of LGBTQ+ families. Fortunately, Solís’s photographic legacy is gaining a wider recognition with the publication of her new book, Luz: Seeing the Space Between Us (Flatlands Press, 2022), and inclusion in the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial World Record exhibition in Cincinnati, Ohio, among other important national institutions like the Poetry Foundation.