Emilio Tamez Is The Perfect Initiate
Tamez refers to this introductory body of work as a ‘mixtape.’ “This is a distillation,” she says. “I started by looking at tens of thousands of pictures, and then I made a layout of around 400 pages. It was a self reflective process, because this is the introduction to my style, to my world, to my visual language.”
She began building that lexicon early in life: “I have one memory, from when I was seven years old, at summer camp,” she recalls. Using a small handheld digital camera, Tamez took a flash photo of a yellow flower in the daytime. The final image showed the flower in isolation, with a black background. “I had no idea how that was even mechanically possible,” she says, “but it was the first time that I had been a part of the conscious making of an image. I discovered that a photograph can become greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, there was the flash, and yes, there was a flower. But to me, the flower is mundane. The flower exists. But in isolating it and making it the subject of something, you make it worth stopping and looking at. [At the time] I did not know how to articulate that at all.”
“I was mystified by it,” Tamez continues, “And I think mystery often tells you where you need to go, even if you don't really understand it yet.” While photography remained her most intuitive practice, she explored an array of creative pursuits and passions from foreign languages to hairdressing throughout the rest of her childhood in Chicago. “I would go on trips to the bookstore with my father,” she recalls. “If I wasn’t in the foreign language section, I was sitting on the floor laying out all the fashion magazines. I was really dazzled by these characters, and the avant garde, and how spectacular all of these things were.”
“Steven Meisel, Steven Klein, Katie Grand, Patti Wilson, Sarah Moon, Franca Sozzani, and so many others — these people made me realize that, while I love the clothing, I love what can be done with it more,” she continues, citing Sozzani’s refrain about speaking through imagery as a way to transcend the barriers of language.
By the time she was a senior at her Catholic high school, Tamez knew that the world of fashion photography was calling her. So she booked a flight to Paris for fashion week and called in sick to school. With no contacts, no plan, and no invitation, Tamez managed to access numerous shows through a combination of white lies and charisma, even shooting Bella Hadid backstage in the lineup at Virgil Abloh’s 2018 show for Off-White. “This confidence came out of me that I didn't have in my real life,” she recalls. “You have to embody your vision, you just have to behave as such, and everything in your environment conforms to the way that you move.” That pivotal trip introduced her to a world of possibilities, one that she would remember as she moved to New York in the next year to attend Pace University.
Shot about a year and a half ago, the cover of the The Perfect Initiate is a photograph from a series titled “The Power of A Lamb.” Model Dayton Aubrey, a dear friend and frequent muse of Tamez’s, is painted chalky white, her body draped in a Yves Saint Laurent dress. Frozen in an expression of anguish, Aubrey resembles a marble statue.
“It was about this female character that has an emotional intensity to her,” Tamez explains. “This was a meditation on a subversive power; the lamb is a symbol of innocence and sometimes submissiveness. The lion and the lamb is an archetypical contrast, and Jesus is called the lamb [in the Bible]. I like the idea of the lamb being the heroine of the story, because there is a power in submission. There's a subversive, subtle power in being delicate, and feminine, and emotionally expressive.”
Aubrey and Tamez met in their freshman year at Pace, where they lived in the same dorm hallway before both dropping out. “I look back and think now that the greatest gift that came out of that time was our friendship,” Tamez says fondly. “Maybe it was the purpose of us going there at all.” On one snowy day, the two ran outside after classes, and Tamez shot portraits of Aubrey topless and wrapped in an assortment of scarves. “That was the beginning of us working together,” she says, “and that relationship has continued for a long time. We always had this personal comfort with each other.”
That personal comfort is key for Tamez to open up creatively to a subject. There are 24 girls across the 212 pages of The Perfect Initiate, and Tamez says she has a “personal attachment” to each of them that allows her to access that vulnerable part of herself. “With [Dayton], it was always so easy,” she says. “Anything that I asked her to do, she knew that I would do myself, and I would push her further and further.” Tamez wore many hats throughout their guerilla-style shoots, from stylist to makeup artist to lighting director.
© e 2024
Tamez turns the page. “When we shot this in 2020, I had just dropped out of school,” she recalls, pointing out one photo. “I went back to Chicago for a few months, and it was hellish. I felt very lost, very confused. I knew that the path I was on in school was not going to work for me. I'm glad I figured it out then, and not 20 years from now. I knew that I had this passion for photography. I knew that I was good at it. But I didn't know how to go about making a feasible career in this line of work. No one teaches you anything, and certainly no one teaches you anything about business. It takes a long time to get a series of stamps of approval to make you even feel like it can actually happen for you.”
She takes a deep breath. “You have to have a very deeply held conviction to take that leap of faith. It took having my feet held to the fire to decide that this was a worthy venture. And so I left Chicago.”
Then 20 years old, Tamez moved into a Brooklyn apartment with some of the friends she had met in Paris during her senior year trip. She secured an internship at the studio of legendary stylist Patti Wilson through a combination of initiative and good fortune. “I was the only intern that wasn't in school,” she recalls, “so I had nothing better to do than be there every day.”
Her distinctive eye and knack for visual research caught Wilson’s attention, and the two began to work together increasingly closely. Despite the circumstances through which Tamez had come to work for her, Wilson always recognized her for what she was capable of: “I was never a styling assistant to her, I was always a photographer,” Tamez says. “She had seen a couple of my photos. Looking back, I hadn't really even gotten started yet.” Wilson began to recruit her to photograph style-outs and eventually travel to assist on major projects, including a shoot for Vogue Italia with Steven Klein.
Since taking the leap to return to New York and pursue her passion, Tamez has shot and worked on numerous magazine covers and editorials. All the while, she has continued to refine her craft and expand her own catalog of work by shooting with friends in her guerilla-style, playing multiple roles and frequently shooting outdoors with a tireless fervor. “I know it's not always easy to work with me,” she admits, “because I have a very specific vision and I don't find it tiresome to work hard to uncover that final image. I have a very exacting vision, I'm very precise. Technical mastery is something that I'm in pursuit of.”
Finding collaborators that regard the process of creation with the same level of intensity and gravitas is essential to her. “In my own crazy little mind, I treat [my shoots] with the sanctity of something greater,” she says. “If I'm going to put this vintage Fendi bag in the background of this photo, in my mind it's going to take on the context in which I would see something like this — and so I'm going to treat this photo as if it's being made for that context.” That level of intention is why the magazine format has always spoken to her. “I was always in my head wondering, what is the spread going to look like? It was always about the spread. So these photos have been next to each other in a diptych, whether it be on Instagram or in my mind, for the last four years since I took them.”
Tamez’s belief in the sanctity of print and in the importance of the layout to the presentation of her work is what led her to e.magazine, which will “eventually expand into an entire world of meditations on a theme or particular area of the human experience.” She derived the name of e.magazine’s introductory issue from her own. “My brother, my dad, my grandfather, and my great grandfather are all named Raul Emilio Tamez,” she explains. “As a kid, I was always told that ‘Raul’ meant ‘God has sent.’ It’s a Spanish name with an Arabic root. And I was always told that the meaning of ‘Emilio’ is the perfect initiate. There were four generations of the cycle until I was born. My father named me Emilio, and that was a very intentional decision. It was meant to say that the perfect initiate had arrived.”
“I carry it with me as part of the archetype of the hero's journey, and that’s part of why I never changed my name,” she continues. “I believe that the hero’s journey is true of every single individual person. We all have our own heroes' journeys. That was a really important thesis of this book.”
While The Perfect Initiate is the first installment of e.magazine, Tamez chose to call it issue zero to represent the culmination of effort that has preceded this genesis. “The blood, sweat, and tears that went into this project, the sacrifice involved is the test from the universe, asking, ‘do you want this?’” she says. “‘Are you capable? Are you afraid? And if you are, will you let it get the best of you? Are you crazy enough? Are you willing enough to put yourself out there, to show people the intimate part of you that you've kept private for four years? Initiations often involve fear and ritual and beauty. For me, this is my initiation into this new level of myself.”
“I've been distilling my practice for four years,” Tamez reflects. “I'm thankful that I haven't done all these bookings and commercial work, and haven’t been bullied by art directors twice my age shooting pictures I didn't care about. I didn't do any of that. There were days I didn't eat so this could happen. I went through this long pilgrimage toward where I stand now, with a developing creative authority, through experience and through sacrifice, to be able to deliver to the world a blessed offering of what I can do.”
As for the next issue of e.magazine? “We can sit down again when the next one is ready,” Tamez says, smiling. “I have a lot more to say, but I don't want to give away too much.”
e.magazine issue zero: The Perfect Initiate will be available for purchase here.
