Joel Salcido grew up in a dual cultural reality and sensibility that derived from living along the U.S. and Mexican border.
As a staff photographer at the El Paso Times he documented the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, covered the Mexico1985 earthquake and traveled extensively in Latin America for USA Today.
In 1991 he resigned as Photo Editor of the El Paso Times to pursue a freelance and fine art career. Eight years later, he moved his family to Spain to work on his year-long project titled, Spain: Millennium Past.
His fine art photographs are now in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the prestigious Harry Ransom Humanities Center at UT Austin, The El Paso Museum of Art, The Austonian and The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University-San Marcos. Both the Federal Reserve Bank in El Paso, Texas and UT San Antonio, have acquired his work for their respective fine art collections.
In addition, his Texas Small Town Series was displayed during the China 14th International Photographic Art Exhibition in Lishui, China. This photo essay remained at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, China.
In 2012, he was part of the Descriptions of China photo exhibit in San Antonio, Texas. This group show was held at the Institute of Texan Cultures in association with the Smithsonian Institution.
Salcido was a Fulbright scholarship finalist for a Bolivian photography project in 2004 and in 2005 was nominated for the Art House Texas Prize.
His series, “Aliento A Tequila,” was published in the December 2013 issue of Texas Monthly. The traveling photo exhibit version of this collection has shown in every major Texas city with it’s national distribution scheduled to start in 2021.
The emblematic landscape photograph from the Aliento A Tequila series titled, “Atotonilco el Alto,” was recently inducted into the National Art Heritage Collection of Mexico and permanently resides at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Mexico City. This same image was also selected for the 2017 Texas Book Festival poster and presented by former First Lady Laura Bush in Dallas.
His book titled, The Spirit of Tequila was released in November of 2017 by Trinity University Press.
Currently, he continues to work on his Texas Mexican-American contemporary writers portrait series.
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