Taking pictures is the best, and only, way for him to express himself

As a young college student, Manuel Ceniceros focused his studies on physics, math, and engineering. That is, until he saw a documentary about photography.

“I basically said, ‘OK, I want to do that,’ so I went out and bought myself a camera, a Pentax MX … and I started taking pictures,” he says. After one of his cousins asked him to take pictures at a martial arts tournament at Southwestern College, Ceniceros’ photos were published and he was paid for his work. “Immediately, I’m like, ‘OK, now how do I become a photojournalist?’”

He changed his major to journalism with a photo emphasis as a student at San Diego State University and started shooting for The Daily Aztec student newspaper.

“At that same time, I started working for the Associated Press, just covering anything that they wanted me to in the county. Then, I got an offer to work for the Chula Vista Star-News, so I just jumped at that and started working for them,” he says. “It was a fun job and I learned a lot. I did everything from car accidents to the dog of the week. I loved it all.”

It led to a career working for local, national, and international news outlets and agencies, transitioning into fashion photography, and embarking on a career in graphic design and as a video editor and motion graphic artist before retiring and returning to his first creative love — photography.

Today, Ceniceros, 66, lives in Chula Vista with his wife, Julia, and their daughter, Gabriella. He’s one of the featured artist’s in Homegrown ArtBeat (HART) by the San Diego Art Directory, a celebration of San Diego’s creative community from 5 to 7 p.m. Saturday at Union Hall Gallery. The program also features live art and music performances by Concetta Antico, Edmund Cosico, Joe Dreamz, Scarlett Baily, Art & Soul by Karen Cadiero-Kaplan, the Cover Lover band, and a street photography slideshow by Heart Collective. Ceniceros, who’ll share a new collection of photos of artists in their personal creative spaces, took some time to talk about how the camera and photography have given him a way to express himself, and how his autism diagnosis has helped him understand his creativity.

Q: What drew you to this art form?

A: I can’t hold a note to save my life. I have no rhythm. I can’t draw. Photography is my only artistic outlet, to be honest with you. I can’t do anything else. For whatever reason, the camera was just a great way for me to express myself. It was the only way for me to express myself. Once I picked up the camera, it felt completely natural to me. The camera just really became a part of me and everything just kind of falls in place when I have a camera in my hands.

What I love about Chula Vista…

It’s a very mellow neighborhood. I love it because there’s people walking their dogs, street vendors that come by every once in a while, selling tamales. In general, it’s a very quiet, peaceful neighborhood. I like the ocean breeze; I love that I’m close to a lot of family.

Q: Can you talk a bit about your experience as a photojournalist? What kinds of stories did you capture?

A: The San Ysidro massacre happened and I was one of the first people there (in 1984, a gunman entered a McDonald’s restaurant and opened fire, shooting 40 people and killing 21). That was a really weird day, for a lot of reasons. It changed my life completely. I got a phone call from Gamma Liaison, which is a French photo agency, and I got a call from Bunte, which is a German magazine. So, I started working for them that day. For those few days, which I didn’t sleep at all, I was working for my newspaper, The Star-News; I was working for the Associated Press; I was working for Gamma Liaison; I was working for Bunte. At one point, I had to drive to the airport and get all my film on the plane to go to New York, Paris, and then Germany. I continued working for everybody and then I got a call in 1985 from Bunte, asking me if I could get on a plane and head to Mexico because there was a huge earthquake in Mexico City. I hopped on a plane with my wife because she’d grown up in Mexico and visited Mexico City a few times. There was a lot of destruction, a lot of death. It was really odd and just showed nature’s power. We actually got caught in another earthquake while we were there that was almost as big as the first one. We were at the airport and I swear people were just yelling and screaming. I just grabbed my wife and we stood by a big pillar. Eventually, we got on a plane and landed in Los Angeles, met a courier, and the film went from Los Angeles to New York, New York to Paris, to Germany. I had a bunch of pictures published from the Mexico City earthquake and one of the ones that won an award was in a big plaza with a pile of rubble about two stories high. There’s a little old man with a broom, just sweeping the plaza and it kind of looks like he swept up that whole two-story pile of rubble. For whatever reason, that really struck a chord with a lot of people.

Q: When, and why, did you transition to fashion photography?

A: I was taking too many chances in photojournalism, just literally running into burning buildings, that kind of stuff. When my wife was pregnant with my oldest son, I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I want to be around for my son, for my family.’ It was taking too much time away from my family at that point, so I decided to transition into fashion photography. I had done a little bit of fashion stuff for the newspaper, working with models, doing some fall lines, and I really enjoyed that. I put together a small portfolio and started working for different modeling agencies. They would send me models to photograph, I went to different magazines and designers, stuff like that. I did quite well for a while, and then things got a little weird in the fashion industry. A couple of my biggest clients went out of business.

Q: Your website says that after you retired, you returned to photography; what field did you retire from?

A: When digital cameras started coming out, I’m like, ‘This isn’t good.’ I had clients standing behind me with their digital cameras, taking pictures. It was time to get out, so I became a graphic designer and did that for a while. From graphic design, I just kind of drifted into video and became a video editor and motion graphic artist. That’s what I retired from.I did anything and everything. I worked on local shows, documentaries, a couple of movies, TV commercials for Mission Federal Credit Union, Hooters. A documentary I was associated with about Dan Rather made it into the Manhattan Film Festival. That was an interesting time.

Q: You’re also neurodivergent? Are there ways that this has shaped your art, your point of view as a photographer?

A: Yeah, I’m autistic. When I do something, I kind of go way too far into it. I hyper fixate on everything and have tunnel vision. I’m very low on the spectrum, but I can see it and now that I know what it is, I can look back and say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been this way all my life.’

It’s basically all of my photography and all of my vision. When I was in graphic design and motion arts, one of the things that people liked about me was that, when I started something, I finished it completely. I wouldn’t get out of the chair until it was done, I would hyper fixate on getting it done. With photography, it just really helps me. I just see the picture, even though I’m looking at the whole world. My eyes just kind of go, ‘Boom, there’s the picture,’ and kind of just fixate on that. A lot of guys, they take a lot of pictures and they move around for angles a lot; I don’t. I kind of just see it, and I may shoot two angles, and I’m done. I like to say that my brain doesn’t even get involved, that it’s just my eyes and my heart. That’s kind of the way it’s always been. Even with my photojournalism, I was able to just home in on what the picture needed to be, or what the story was.

Q: You’re one of the featured artists at Homegrown ArtBeat (HART) today; what is it?

A: It’s celebrating the incredible creativity that exists right here in San Diego County, showcasing the talent you live alongside every day and don’t really realize it. It’s also about reminding people that art isn’t just in museums and galleries, but that it’s part of your daily life. The mission is to make people aware of that and to notice creativity everywhere. It really is helping celebrate how art is growing as an industry here in San Diego, and to help raise the awareness of art, in general, in San Diego.

Q: You’re displaying new work, titled “Creative Space,” at HART. Tell us about this new exhibition of your work.

A: I started doing street portraits, and San Diego’s kind of a weird place for doing street portraits; it’s not like New York or Chicago, where there’s a whole lot of busy people running around. I drove downtown and it was kind of empty, just a lot of tourists. I really like to talk to people, and I really like meeting people, and that’s one of the things that I think made me a good photojournalist, is that I really like interacting with people and getting to know them. So, at one point, my daughter said we should go down to Barrio Logan and I took my camera with me. We started walking around, and there’s a lot of little art hub kind of places. There are retail spaces, but there’s also studio spaces, so we walked into one and just started looking around. I started taking pictures of small business owners, initially. One of the first artists I took pictures of was Gerardo Meza. He’s just an amazing person and a fun guy, very outgoing. So, I took pictures of him in his studio, and I started meeting more people, more artists, in Barrio Logan and taking pictures of them in their studios. I thought I could expand this, and since I follow a lot of artists on Instagram, I asked if I could come to them and photograph them where they work. They were like, “Oh, I just work at home, in my living room” or “It’s just in my garage,” but that was perfect. Some artists have big studios, like one lady I photographed who has a studio gallery in La Jolla. Most people are in their garage, or one person I photographed just cleared a spot on her living room floor, put the canvas up against the wall, and started painting. I mainly want to show that you can do art anywhere, that art doesn’t have to necessarily have all this stuff to do it. Everybody creates in different spaces. I just wanted to show people that everybody works differently, their creativity comes out in different ways.

Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

A: That there’s no secret to photography, it’s just getting out and doing it. My brother told me that you can teach techniques, but you can’t teach creativity. I think that’s probably the best advice I’ve ever received in my life.

Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?

A: Maybe that one of the reasons I shoot in black and white is because I’m colorblind. Color just doesn’t interest me, I think it just distracts from stuff, photographically. Subtracting the color, I think, gets the image down to its essence.

Q: Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend.

A: It kind of depends on what I’m doing at the time. The two things that have always been a constant in my life are photography and fishing, so I kind of have two ideal weekends. One is just going out with my camera and seeing people, talking to them and getting to know their stories. The second one would be fishing. I grew up fishing and it’s one of the things that I just love. I live, like, two minutes from J Street marina, so just fishing at the marina and walking around and meeting people.