Niki Navarro Gutierrez
College of Communication and Information, Digital Media Production (BA)
Nymphalidae
I am a visual storyteller who uses documentary practice with a poetic style to display cultural memory. I am majoring in Digital Media Production at Florida State University while also studying photography and Latin American Indigenous history. Home exists for me in between the U.S. and Costa Rica; between the fast, individualistic, extractive logic of modern life here and the slower, collective way of life I encounter in Costa Rica. A push and pull shapes my lens, contributing to the ideologies behind my work.
Central to my photography is a deep appreciation for the indigenous idea of Animism—the belief that plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena possess spirit and agency. It illustrates a world alive with consciousness. While the Western ideology of Anthropocentrism—the belief that humans are the sole center of meaning—reduces nature to backdrop or commodity. It teaches us to see land as property and limits communication solely to human language. Nature is not just the background for humans, everything participates in experience. Through Anthropocentrism, we center ourselves at the root, who gives us the right? My work emerges in resistance against this narrowed perception; I document how nature becomes subject rather than setting. My images often exclude the human figure, yet they are still meant to invoke connection within us. By removing the human body, I intentionally decenter it; allowing the viewer to encounter the natural world as a relation, not as a resource through hierarchy or progress.
Through my documentary practice and poetic art style, I work to document moments that feel both real and otherworldly; asking viewers to reconsider what has been forced silent or invisible by our hierarchical ideology. If a branch can feel sentient, if a lake can burst with life, if a butterfly can have character, then perhaps our understanding of meaning must expand.
Artwork Description:
The Búho butterfly is a species native to Costa Rica as well as other Latin American regions. Threatened today by their illegal extraction as well as habitat loss from deforestation. The Búho calls for attention from a branch; taken on T-max 400 black and white 35mm film. The lens's aperture was wide open to create a Bokeh background and 'fuzzy' effect, allowing for a lack of clarity to exist.