Zachary Silva’s camera escorts us to extraordinary places. We see UC Merced from high above, the land around the campus warped by a fisheye lens. We look straight down a pole at a fluttering U.S. flag and two lonely tractors.
These eye-popping points of view are among other photographs by Silva on display at Carnegie Arts Center in Turlock. The UC Merced student is one of a dozen artists in an exhibition called “Valley Focus: Growing Talent.”
Each of the 12 artists in the show is 35 or younger and has Central Valley ties. Their work was chosen from more than 30 entries.
“Valley Focus: Growing Talent” continues through May 17 at the arts center, 250 N. Broadway, Turlock. At 6 p.m. May 8, Silva will take part in a talk at the center about the exhibit.
On a breezy April morning, sitting at a table along UC Merced’s Academic Walk, Silva, 23, said that besides taking the viewer to unusual places, he wants to convey his fascination with intersecting forces from the old and the new.
“I like to explore contradictions and juxtaposition. Humanity and technology. Agriculture and technology,” he said. “Here on campus, I can feel the future of it all. Then I look past this and see beautiful fields and landscapes.”
Silva is a fourth-year mechanical engineering major with an eye toward conducting research into agricultural technology. His studies into the use of drones bridge his interests in photography and agriculture.
Silva said his love of snapping images was sparked after he signed up to be on the student newspaper staff at Nogales High School in La Puente, a Los Angeles suburb in the San Gabriel Valley. At their first meeting, the adviser asked: Who wants to be the photographer?
“I shot my hand up. ‘I can do it,’” Silva recalled. The adviser gave the freshman the school’s Canon EOS 6D and set him loose.
“I was able to be down on the field for football games,” he said. “And for all of my four years, we had a pretty strong team, so it was nice to celebrate their success.”
Then, during his senior year, he entered a news photo from downtown L.A. in a James Alan Cox Foundation student photojournalism contest. The image earned him a first-place prize of a Canon EOS Rebel T7. A step up. More importantly, a camera of his own.
“That lit a fire under me,” Silva said.
At UC Merced, he first worked for Media Cats, taking 360-degree photos of an empty campus during the pandemic; you can see the photos today on Google Maps street views. He then spent a year taking photos for the Engineering Service Learning program. For the past couple of years, he has worked as the house photographer for Bobcat Athletics.
“What photographing sports has taught me is that I don't take photographs. I receive them. That’s part of the art show’s message. When I'm looking through the camera, I can anticipate the shot pulling from previous experience, and just be in the moment.”
