We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tony Rincon. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tony below.
Tony, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
I’d say around mid-2009 I mentally crashed out from everything in life, I was 22 working full-time at a grocery store and trying to go to community college full-time to complete my graphic design ambitions. I always knew I wanted that but I just wasn’t seeing it during my time in college, I had no mentor, no guidance, just “go do this and pass your classes”. That wasn’t real guidance, and working at a grocery store wasn’t really keeping me balanced. So I basically ran away from everything, stopped attending classes, turned my two weeks notice after an argument, and knew joining the Marine Corps was my next step to hit the reset button on everything.
How I was going to get there and what I was going to do was still up in the air but I knew I had to get away from everything. I saw the Navy was recruiting as a Photographer but I didn’t want to join the Navy, so I walked next door and asked the Marine Corps recruiters if they had that option available in Houston. They were direct with me and let me know that it wasn’t a thing if I joined as Reservist. But if I joined as an administrator, I would be back in time to get deployed. That meant I was going to be traveling a bit, and that’s what I wanted overall, to just get away.
Fast forward to the end of my mandatory time, and I needed to figure out my next step. Somebody casually asked me how my education was, and I had realized that I needed to right the wrongs that I had been avoiding. So through enough convincing to be allowed to continue my academic career, I had a mentor that guided me, graduated with my Visual Communications degree, kept pushing for my Associates of Arts, and eventually got my Bachelors of Fine Arts in Photography, where now I’m currently working on my Masters of Fine Arts in Art and Social Practice.
Tony, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My education is in Fine Arts Photography and Graphic Design. When I tell people I’m a photographer, they automatically assume I do family photo sessions in the woods or maternity/engagement photos. That’s not what I do, I tell stories. I find reasons to photograph people, tell their stories and bring eyes to their product or living situation. I want to uncover stories that we often ignore because of stereotypes or assumptions. When I’m not interacting with people, I find minimalism through man-made objects and present them in unique ways that engages the viewer to question what it is and think about how different perspectives about their surroundings. The goal is to make them realize that sometimes it is okay to slow down and look around and appreciate where you’re at.
When I’m not photographing, I’ll work on typical jobs required for graphic designers like logos, websites, books, posters, flyers, pamphlets. I still enjoy it and I’m happy that I haven’t completely abandoned it and these little tasks still scratch that creative itch.
Currently I’m exploring what it means to be a social practice artist, it’s working with a community and bringing to the front real world issues and finding creative ways to find solutions. Sometimes those solutions are years away from happening but if we can develop a roadmap and find the key points that will solve those issues, we can better establish a working relationship with these communities and hopefully develop a plan for other communities across the country can emulate to their own situations. In my situation, it’s about discovering why social interactions are minimizing over the years and using Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a tool to eliminate those gaps and introduce a new community.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
There is a specific reason why I always label myself as a Fine Arts Photographer and not just simply a photographer, it’s mainly to avoid confusion pertaining to commercial business and networking opportunities. To add to this, you’ll see on my Instagram that I label myself as a Visual Designer, not an artist. People have their goals and wants when it comes to being an artist, and I completely respect that. But I didn’t come up in the traditional sense of appreciating art, I didn’t spend time learning to paint or draw, I couldn’t name you one artist. Even as a graphic designer, I couldn’t name you a big name graphic designer, I focused on myself. I sat in front of my computer after school and learned how Photoshop worked, how Illustrator worked. Going through college I learned InDesigned and further pushed myself to learn coding and digital illustrations. It was when I got to university that I had to re-orientate myself and see things not from a commercial lens, but from a fine arts perspective.
That opened up new opportunities but I also didn’t want to completely abandon what brought me to the dance, so to say. It definitely took some adjusting to get to better understanding of Fine Arts, I switched mediums from graphic design to photography and learned how to make photography rather than take photography, which is something that gets lost in everybody that wants to expand their social media through photography. Open any social media app and you’ll see photos, everybody has a cellphone, people constantly take photos. They take self-portraits, or selfies as we know them, we are visual communicators. But we are also decision-makers, we decide what to wear, what to eat, how we approach things, we are constantly making decisions and judgements based on our interactions and by looking at a photograph, I want the viewer to think why that photo is being represented on a wall and not on our cell phone.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
I think the biggest hurdle that my field will always encounter is finding the space to exhibit our creative outlet, this is something I noticed towards the end of my undergraduate. There really wasn’t a space where I could just have the creative freedom to do anything I wished to do, and if there was a space it was mainly either in Houston or in a different city. Graduating students would either be forced to accept a small studio either through a department store or local small business. Yes, I completely understand that they need real world experience, you’ll never hear me not say that to prospects, but that cannot be the end goal as a photographer especially a fine arts photographer.
At the end of the day, we all have bills to pay and I’m not going to stop people from making sure they stay afloat, but we cannot have students get a formal education and then all of the sudden they are staring into the abyss wondering why they cannot financially support their need to exercise their creative mind. Do we really need another food establishment in the city? I think we’ve crammed enough of those options in one city, let’s rather put our resources into something where we can allow artists to gather, find the space they need, and help further build their city, their own playground in a creative way that is certainly lacking when it comes to visual representation. Look at any art establishment in your city and you’ll always find that their either under-funded, under-resourced, under-utilized and the gap to allow emerging artists to enter is far too wide that it makes it difficult to get your career going.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://tonyrincon.com
- Instagram: LiquidImpact
Image Credits
“Domestic Supply of Commodified Bodies” – Project Row House Summer 2022: Tony Rincon & Liz Hayes, photos provided by Alex Barber
Study of Formal Elements in Minimalism through man-made objects – Tony Rincon 2022