Playing hide-and-seek with friends while visiting his grandmother in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, photographer Joel Salcido saw his future in the darkness of a cardboard box.
“To my amazement, light emanating from a tiny hole was projecting an upside-down image from outside inside the box,” recalled Salcido, who emigrated with his family from Juárez to neighboring El Paso, Texas, in 1964. “I had unknowingly discovered the camera obscura pinhole technique that French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used to capture the world’s first permanent photograph.”
That image, the Niépce Heliograph from 1827, is part of the extraordinary cultural archive at The University of Texas at Austin’s event-capable Harry Ransom Center.
Observing his uncle, Francisco, in the glow of a light box inside a Juárez photography studio was another “surreal and spellbinding” awakening. “The portrait negatives on the light box’s frosted glass window struck me as ghostly human imprints covered in silver ash,” Salcido said.
Finding passion and purpose in these “hypnotic” childhood revelations, he started out as the photographer for his high school newspaper. At first “awestruck” by the rich discoveries, unexpected surprises and “alchemy” of the photographic process, he quickly came to understood “the instant power of photography to communicate with a mass audience, and the social responsibility that goes with that.”
Winning multiple journalism awards as chief photographer and photo editor of the campus newspaper while attending the University of Texas at El Paso, Salcido got a call from The El Paso Times. Hired as a lab tech in 1979, he then embarked on an epic 12-year journey as a photojournalist for the paper, capturing images along the 830-mile Texas-Mexico border and across Latin America and Europe.
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“Few people know the exhilaration and fear of photographing the best and worst of humanity,” said Salcido, calling his encounters “priceless” for a photographer. In 1991, sensing that his creative spirit was eroding, he decided to reclaim his passion for the craft and the art form as a freelancer.
Powerfully aware of his own lineage, or “a vision born of two different worlds,” his primary focus became the people and places of the Texas-Mexico borderlands. “The region merges two cultural identities into a uniquely rich human experience,” explained Salcido. “While not always comfortable, there is raw beauty at the core.”
Viewing Texas as “an expansive stage of opportunities” Salcido digs into the idiosyncrasies of the state’s inherent multilayered history born of American Indian, Spaniard, Mexican, Tejano and American cowboy identities. “I am also drawn to coastal Texas, which has its own distinct personality and places of pristine beauty like Padre Island National Seashore,” he said. “Contrast that with the vast desert lands of far West Texas, where since childhood, I have always gravitated to the exotic formations and ancient rock paintings of El Paso’s Hueco Tanks State Park & Historic Site. Texas is also a land of extremes and endless intrigue.”
Salcido’s arresting photographs regularly appear in Texas Highways and Texas Monthly. His most recent feature for the latter, from November 2024, took him across Texas and Spain in pursuit of the origins of an enduring Texas symbol, the Longhorn. For his 2017 book The Spirit of Tequila, Salcido delved into the agave fields and distilleries of Jalisco to trace the origins of Mexico’s legendary spirit.
Renowned urban historian Dr. Ricardo Romo, a former president of the University of Texas, recognized Salcido as “one of the few seasoned Latino photo-journalist commentators of life on the Texas-Mexico Borderlands.”
“Sometimes I feel like a vehicle for a higher purpose,” Salcido said. “I’ll feel a distinct energy or spirit that comes through me unto others through my photographs.”
