NativeImages Production Group — Southern California

Dr. Larisa Broyles holds a PhD in anthropology and is a professor at Moreno Valley College. She co-produces the studio’s documentary and publication work and holds equal standing in it: research design, ethnographic method, interview practice and curriculum are hers as much as anyone’s. She served as co-advisor on the USC School of Cinematic Arts production Off Track, and is co-author of the We Are Birds companion book.

Participatory, not extractive

Most documentation of Native communities has been done by arriving, recording and leaving. The material ends up somewhere the community cannot reach, described in words the community did not choose.

This studio works the other way. The relationship comes before the camera, often by years. Permission is ongoing rather than signed once. What gets shared is decided by the people who gave it, and some material is held rather than published because that is what was agreed. The result is slower, smaller in output, and considerably more accurate.

​Dr. Larisa Broyles, PhD.— 
anthropologist, co-producer, professor

​The BIO —

Albert Chacon is of Cupeño, Cahuilla, and Apache descent, with family origins at Kupa — Warner Springs — the Cupeño homeland from which the people were forcibly removed in 1903. He grew up in East Los Angeles and came to that heritage as an adult.

For roughly thirty years he has documented Native California through film, photography and fieldwork, building the relationships that made the work possible long before he ever made a professional case for it. His practice runs across documentary filmmaking, professional photography, anthropological fieldwork, cultural consulting and archival curation.

The people in the frame decide what the frame is for. That principle has shaped the whole body of work. It has also meant the work has gone institutionally unrecognised at times, because the method puts the speaker at the centre rather than the documentarian. He considers that the correct trade.

He is a fully insured professional videographer and photographer, based in Rancho Belago and working throughout Southern California.

Albert Chacon — filmmaker, photographer, cultural consultant, educator