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Louis Buhl & Co. is pleased to present a new Salon Highlight with Detroit-based artist Lorena Cruz Santiago, opening August 9th, 2025. The presentation features new cyanotypes that explore themes of labor, memory, and freedom through the language of gardening.
Santiago's practice is rooted in a critical engagement with photography—its tools, histories, and imperial legacies—reclaiming image-making through collaborative processes that center family, nurture, and land. With her work, Cruz departs from traditional camera-based processes by turning to cyanotype, a historic printing method that relies on light and direct contact rather than a lens. In the past, Santiago has frequently engaged her parents as active participants in developing her compositions, using FaceTime to co-create images of their California garden, later printed and incorporated into installations.
In her latest body of work, Santiago expands that practice by integrating plants she has cultivated herself in Michigan. Working camera-free, she creates large-scale cyanotypes on fabric that document the silhouettes of beans, peppers, and other homegrown vegetation. “These prints record the tangled and spiraled forms of the plants, and I imagine the process of exposing the prints as having a similar alchemy to that of plants during photosynthesis,” the artist explains. They also mark a shift in perspective: while still grounded in the domestic collaboration that has classified past works of the same nature, the featured body of work reflects Cruz’s own gardening practice as a site of continuity and autonomy—one that both deepens and honors her family’s traditions. The result is a visual lexicon shaped by intimacy and reciprocity.
The series stems from Cruz’s research into Indigenous Visual Sovereignty and a personal reckoning with how photography has shaped her family’s history. Her grandparents, both part of the Bracero guest worker program during WWII, are only visible to her through their ID cards—documents that serve as both rare keepsakes and evidence of systemic exploitation. Growing up in Oaxaca, Cruz’s family had no access to cameras; the few existing images of her parents’ youth are government-issued, intended to identify them as foreigners. In response, Cruz reclaims image-making as a tool for agency, initiating a living family archive that advances an intergenerational practice rooted in the resistance of imposed narratives.
Salon Highlight: Lorena Cruz is on view from August 9th through October 8th, 2025 at Louis Buhl & Co.