NAPA VALLEY PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY

Norma I. Quintana Lecture at NVPS on January 22, 2024. THEME: Environmental portraits of someone you don't know
California-based photographer, Norma I. Quintana began her career in documentary photography in the late 1990s, studying with a number of influential photographers which included Mary Ellen Mark, Shelby Lee Adams, and Graciela Iturbide. She favors black and white film photography, collaborating with  her subjects as she strives to reveal them. She shared insights gained over the years as she critiqued members' submitted images, offering valuable suggestions for photographing individuals in meaningful ways. 

UCRArts Artist Talk

Norma I. Quintana Virtual Artist Talk at UCRArts on August 20, 2020. Facing Fire: Art, Wildfire and the End of Nature in the West
Douglas McCulloh, Senior Curator at California Museum of Photography, and artists Norma I. Quintana, Samantha Fields, and Noah Berger from the Facing Fire exhibition at UCR ARTS join in a panel discussion around art, photography, and wildfire. About the Facing Fire exhibition: Fire as omen and elemental force, as metaphor and searing personal experience — these are the subjects explored by the artists of Facing Fire. California’s diverse ecologies are fire-prone, fire-adapted, even fire-dependent. In the past two decades, however, West Coast wildfires have exploded in scale and severity. There is a powerful consensus that we have entered a new era. The artists of Facing Fire bring us incendiary work from active fire lines and psychic burn zones. They face fire, sift its aftermath, and struggle with the implications.

B & H LECTURE

Norma I. Quintana Artist Talk at B&H Event Space on April 29, 2019. A Photographer Turns Her Lens On Personal Tragedy.
On October 8, 2017, the Atlas Peak wildfire roared through the neighborhood of photographer Norma I. Quintana. She lost her home, studio, and photography collection. In order to process the tragedy, she began to pull charred and melted objects out of the wreckage and created a photography series titled Forage From Fire. She talks about how the persistence of memory becomes an inspiration and path to recovery.

CITY COLLEGE OF SAN FRANCISCO PHOTO LECTURE

Norma I. Quintana Lecture at the CCSF on March 19th, 2018.
Norma I. Quintana is an American photographer and educator working in the tradition of social documentary. She photographs with film, primarily in black and white using available light. Quintana has studied under Mary Ellen Mark, Graciela Iturbide and Shelby Lee Adams and is a founding member of the Bay Area non-profit, PhotoAlliance. Quintana’s most recent project, Circus: A Traveling Life, was published by Damiani Editore, in Bologna, Italy. Quintana currently lives in Northern California with her family and their house was completely destroyed in the 2017 Napa Fire. As she sifts through the rubble of their home, she is documenting items that she recovers from the ashes for a new body of work entitled Forage from Fire.

B & H LECTURE

Norma I. Quintana Artist Talk at B&H Event Space on Jan 2 2015. Circus: A Traveling Life
Shooting with a medium-format film camera, using only available light, Norma I. Quintana photographed the performance artists of an American, one-ring circus for nearly a decade to create this haunting documentary series. In this presentation, Norma talks about her slow approach to documentary photography, the relationship between subject and photographer, the process of creating a long-term body of work and editing years of shooting material.