Charity Vargas is a visual artist and editorial photographer in San Francisco. She photographs environmental portraits and cultural landscapes.
Charity Vargas is a photo based visual artist exploring place. She is interested in cultural histories, land use over time, the environment, memory and women’s maternal ancestry. Through a researched based framework she creates a narrative or history of a place, its past knowledges and photographs a memento of that informed impression. Her photo based work collapses time, employs panographic stitching, negative layering and the amalgamation of still images into short films. Resilience is a theme threaded throughout her work.
She has explored and photographed The Presidio of San Francisco for over twenty years. Its transformation from decommissioned army base to urban national park is the basis for her book The Presidio: Portraits of a Changing Landscape which is held in collection at the Library of Congress. Her Pandemic image film still, untitled, 2021 was selected for the de Young Open 2023. She is represented by Photo-eye.
Her next book of handmade of platinum illuminated monochrome images of the Isle of Skye, in the Hebrides, Scotland printed on and bound with sheep’s wool is in process.
