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FOTOSEPTIEMBRE 2023
Rare Photo Of Selena Included In San Antonio Photographer’s Retrospective
Deborah Martin, Staff Writer, San Antonio Express News
August 30, 2023

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Rare Photo Of Selena Included In San Antonio Photographer’s Retrospective
Deborah Martin, Staff Writer, San Antonio Express News
August 30, 2023

Some of San Antonio photographer Al Rendón’s images of Selena are well-known, including the cover shot for the Tejano superstar’s breakout album “Entre a Mi Mundo.”

But Rendón found an image when he was going through his archives to prepare for a retrospective of his work that hadn’t been published before.

In the 1990 shot, Selena seems to be midway through a dance move, one foot off the ground and her body turned to the side. She and Los Dinos, her family band, were opening for comedian Paul Rodriguez.

“They were still pretty unknown,” Rendón said. “I only took three pictures of them, and that one was the only good one.”

The long-forgotten image is included in “Mi Cultura: Bringing Shadows Into the Light: The Photography of Al Rendón.”

The exhibit, which is part of Fotoseptiembre, opens Saturday at the Witte Museum.

The images in the show and the companion catalog were culled from 50 years of work. Rendón’s professional career began in 1973, when he somewhat clandestinely shot a Led Zeppelin concert at the old Hemisfair Arena. By then, he’d already had a few years of experience under his belt.

His mother was the family photographer, but when he was about 12, she began having a hard time framing photos through the tiny viewfinder of the Instamatic camera. So he offered to take over. Soon photography became his passion and, eventually, his career.

Over the years, he has taken images documenting life in San Antonio and elsewhere. He has photographed rock stars who have come through town, as well as Tejano and conjunto artists, many of whom call the city home. He’s captured charreadas and all sorts of depictions of the Virgen de Guadalupe.

Some of his images are in Smithsonian collections, and in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Witte, and in the Wittliff Collection at Texas State University.

I wasn’t looking at it as an art form at the very beginning,” said Rendón, 66. “I was just documenting, just like anybody that thinks something is important to them is going to document. One of the phrases I use a lot is, my family is my culture. And I don’t mean just my blood family. I mean all the Mexican culture that goes on here in San Antonio. You can’t escape it. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Rendón paged through the exhibition catalog and shared some of the stories behind the images.

Rock ‘n’ roll

Rendón was so green when he shot his first concert in 1973 that he thought he’d be able to bring a case filled with camera equipment into Hemisfair Arena, where Led Zeppelin was playing, without any sort of authorization. To be fair, he was just 16 years old. And he was only at the show because his brother offered him a ticket when a friend wasn’t able to go. But he wasn’t intimidated when a security guard told him to take all that stuff back to his car.

The teenage shutterbug said he couldn’t do that, because his parents had dropped him off. And he couldn’t put the case in an office because something might happen to it. The equipment belonged to Central Catholic High School, where he was a sophomore. If it was damaged or stolen, he’d get in trouble.

Eventually, he got the OK to take his seat up in the rafters and shoot from there as long as he didn’t use a flash.

“But, of course, I didn’t stay in my seat,” he said. “As soon as they let the crowd rush the stage, I went right up to the front, found my brother and his friends, and one of them put me on his shoulders, and that’s how I was able to get those shots.

“And then they shined a flashlight on me and that was my cue to get out of there.”

He developed the photos, including shots of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, at school the next day and took some of them to the program director at KONO, who asked him to shoot an upcoming Elton John concert.

“That started me on this never-ending cycle of going to concerts,” he said.

Selena

By 1985, he shifted his focus from rock to Tejano and conjunto music. He had started shooting for the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, and one of the first things he photographed was the Tejano Conjunto Festival.

“I went to every conjunto festival for 10 years, taking pictures of all the greats,” he said. “And going to all those rock ‘n’ roll shows really prepared me well to capture this genre of music. Conjunto had kind of morphed into Tejano, and this is when Tejano was reaching its peak. And, of course, Selena was part of that.”

Rendón had done formal shoots with some of Selena’s label mates and wanted to do one with her, too.

“I was bugging the record company to photograph Selena’s album that was coming out,” he said. “They had another photographer that she had been working with, and he did the photos for ‘Entre a Mi Mundo,’ and they just didn’t like them. So they needed a reshoot and they called me very last minute, and I was like, yes, thank you, I finally get to do a studio shoot with Selena. I’d already photographed her live and seen her perform.”

He was told that the original shoot had been too dark. So he set up a backdrop of white parachute material and was careful to light the studio so it would be bright. And he was struck by how natural the teenager singer was in front of his lens.

“I put her in front of the camera, and I started off giving her a few little directions, and she just started posing like crazy,” he said. “I was so impressed.”

Charreada

Rendón has a long-standing relationship with the Fiesta Commission. In 1981, one of the first years he worked for the organization, he was given a list of events to shoot. He was familiar with most of them, but one exception was A Day in Old Mexico.

“It was over on the South Side, and I go over there and there’s all these guys dressed up in charro outfits,” he said. “It was the most authentic Fiesta event I’d been to in all 10 days. And so I immediately fell in love with charreada.”

He made it a point to shoot the event at every Fiesta going forward, then started going to other charreadas, as well. He photographed charros on horseback and behind the scenes. And he collected some of those images in his 2002 book “Charreada, Mexican Rodeo in Texas.”

Tía Lupe

At the start of his career, Rendón focused on commercial work. When fellow photographer Kathy Vargas asked him to submit something for an exhibit at the Guadalupe, he took his first image with artistic intent.

“Up to that point, I’d never had been asked to be in an art exhibit,” he said. “I’d been taking a lot of photos for myself, but I had never exhibited anything.

“When she said I’m doing a show on the Virgin of Guadalupe, the first thing that popped in my mind was taking a picture of my aunt in front of her bed, because she slept with this wool blanket year-round on her bed, of the Virgin of Guadalupe.”

The black-and-white image, taken in 1986, graces the front of the catalog.

Uvalde

Some of the most recent images in the exhibit came from a series of trips Rendón took to Uvalde following the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. He documented a series of murals created in the memory of the 19 children and two teachers who lost their lives in the massacre.

He made the photos at the behest of Eduardo Díaz, deputy director of the National Museum of the American Latino, who wrote about the project in one of the essays in the Witte exhibition catalog.

“It took about a month for all those murals to be completed,” Rendón said. “And so every chance I’d get, I’d go down there, try to take a few pictures of the artists working on the murals.”

He also took portraits of some of families in front of the murals created in memory of their lost loved ones.

Díaz and Rendón had traveled to Uvalde together. They also visited a memorial that went up on San Antonio’s Southwest Side where the bodies of 53 migrants were found in the back of a tractor-trailer.

“They were just completing putting all those crosses up and everything,” Rendón said. “And then I went back later real early in the morning, when nobody was there. And I shot a video. You could hear my footsteps walking down the gravel road, but in the background you hear a ghostly sound. And at the same time I’m walking by, these birds are flying out and chirping in the trees and stuff. It was very moving video.

“There’s so many stories.”

Written By Deborah Martin