Victoria Campa

“No, I like it more when you put the right hand on your belt,” Victoria tells me and I adjust accordingly for the camera. She takes what I think is the winning shot.

We are at her place in The Mission, doing what can be best described as an artistic service trade. I am posing for a photoshoot that’s going to be used in Victoria’s upcoming project called Duality, for which she photographs friends and captures the two opposing sides of their personality. After that, we will spend the rest of the day doing her interview for the magazine.

Victoria has set up a white canvas on her rooftop and I am standing in front of it, wearing a mesh black tank top, neon beanie, square pink sunglasses, print baggy jeans, and platform sneakers. We agreed that the two sides of me should be the glitzy, pop-culture-fan Denis and the nerdy, bookish Denis.

Which is why Victoria is trying to get the right shot of the first Denis, with my right hand on my belt, lips pouted, and my left hand holding my phone as I take selfies. I can also tell that she’s doing more than just taking photos because she is switching between different cameras, but I don’t want to be the annoying subject who keeps interrupting the artist’s flow to ask questions, so I instead focus on being present for the camera.

Three days before our art date, I saw Victoria at the opening ceremony of the exhibition where her project would be displayed later in the month. I had already told Victoria about the idea for the magazine, and was planning to book a day with her at the end of summer. But I had to adjust plans quickly that night after learning she would be leaving her tech job, leaving San Francisco, and moving to New York in one month to follow her passion of becoming a full-time photographer.

I met Victoria at work two summers ago because we were staffed on the same project. She was working in recruiting operations and, even though our interactions were limited to video calls, I could sense that we were on the same wavelength. After a month of working closely together, we agreed to meet up officially for burgers in the city. We hit it off that night and continued hanging out. I learned about her interest in cinema, her passion for photography, and the inspiring stories of her soul-searching that brought her to San Francisco. When the time came, I knew I needed to capture her story for the magazine.

“Okay, so the first place I want to take you to is Adobe Books,” she tells me as we walk on 24th Street.

An unobtrusive bookstore in The Mission neighborhood, Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative was actually the place where Victoria’s photography collective had their first-ever exhibition. And when I say Victoria’s, I mean it in the truest sense of a possessive noun. Victoria is the co-founder of the collective.

“This place is really meaningful to me because it represents this neighborhood, which I love, and the DIY community,” she adds. “Whenever I’m thinking of the neighborhood in which I want to live, it’s super important to me that it’s close to a good bookstore and a good theater.”

We go inside and Victoria takes me to a small backroom, where apparently a lot of DIY exhibitions, performances, and talks happen. The space is overflowing with colorful images and odd texts. Despite having lived just several blocks away for almost two years and having seen this place before, I never actually went inside.

“It’s interesting,” I observe, “it’s very intimate. Kinda has an anti-gallery feel. Was that part of the reason?”

“Definitely. I like my exhibitions to be interactive. That’s something I’ve always been interested in. Art can feel intimidating to people, and I think art should be accessible to everyone. It should generate conversations.”

I mention to Victoria that I recently watched a bizarre conversation between Julia Fox and Grimes about the impact of generative AI on art, during which Grimes made a good point that technology has actually democratized music production. It didn’t make it obsolete. Is this what she means by art being accessible to everyone?

“For sure,” she replies enthusiastically. “I like that word. Photography has definitely become democratized, which is great. I mean, just think about it. Anyone can do photography today. You have a phone in your pocket that you can take at any moment and snap a photo. And people are good at it.”

I am not surprised by Victoria’s point of view. There is a lot of tension in public discourse right now between the relationship of art and technology, with rapidly-evolving tech having a bit of a doomsday narrative around it. But for someone like Victoria, who studied computer science and worked in tech before embracing photography full-time, art and tech can coexist. I can sense that this topic will lead us into a very meaty conversation about her life story, so I propose that we start walking toward Victoria’s next stop: Atlas Cafe on 20th Street.

Born in New York but raised in Madrid, Victoria has lived her life in the liminal space between American and Spanish identities. Her dad is Spanish and her mom is American. That intersection translated to her as well.

“Here in the States,” she says, “I’ve always felt distinctly Spanish. But growing up in Spain, I was always the American one. Kids there were always like ‘Oh my god, Victoria is the one who has peanut butter in the pantry’.”

She loved her life in Madrid and the quality of life that came with it. But she also knew that she wanted to experience living in New York as an adult. She was born there and felt that her life story needed that chapter. Luckily, it worked out; she got accepted to Columbia University and moved to the US after high school. It was a rocky start though, and for a while, her life in New York was dark. Dark in the most literal sense—she almost died.

“On my twentieth birthday, I got very sick,” Victoria tells me.

A piercingly loud alarm is blasting somewhere close to the coffee shop as we talk, and it’s odd because it fits the tone of Victoria’s story and because no one else in the coffee shop seems bothered by this obnoxious sound.

“I had appendicitis, which is usually not a big deal at all, but I was misdiagnosed initially. So, I ended up in the hospital in New York for a month as a result because the infection was really serious. I went through such a state of shock because of this experience. I lost all of my hair and I had to wear a wig for a while.”

While her body was in an elevated state of stress, her mind was also trying to make sense of why she was even in New York. She was majoring in computer science because she had always been good at math as a kid and had a great math teacher who inspired her to pursue programming in college. Plus, she felt that she needed to get the best bang for her buck.

“I mean, college in the US is just so expensive,” she says. “I was spending all this money to get an education, and I just didn’t think the right use of time was to major in things like literature. I thought, what’s the point, I can read books on my own, I don’t need a degree to do this. Looking back, that wasn’t the right way to think at all. I was clearly doing a disservice to myself because I realized very quickly that computer science was not for me.”

It was a lot to handle. Victoria took a semester off to allow these eerily concurrent crises to run their course so that her mind and spirit could stabilize. When she came back, the second chapter—and a much better chapter—of her life in New York began.

“New social circles happened, I decided to double major in psychology, I started doing more photography, I became an editor of a literary magazine, and co-founded a photography magazine. The last two years in New York were much, much better.”

It seems to me that it was during this time that Victoria’s personal signature in her photography started to come to life. She had previously been experimenting with fashion photography as a Flickr-obsessed teenager, conducting no-frills photoshoots with her sister Carmen. During this time in college, however, some of her more significant projects came to life.

Layers of Synergy, a project that she spearheaded with a friend whose name is also Victoria, combined Victoria’s eye for portrait photography and her friend’s eye for landscape photography. Victoria #1 would do a full film roll of portraits and Victoria #2 would do a full film roll of landscapes. Without showing what was actually captured, each Victoria would then give her film roll to the other Victoria, and they would then repeat the process, layering portraits over the landscapes and vice versa.

“That sounds very unpredictable,” I say.

“It was,” she replies. “Some of them didn’t work out. But some of them turned out to be beautiful. In that way, film is really magical because you can’t control it. And I personally struggle when there is lack of structure and control in life.”

Hearing about her discomfort with uncertainty would make one think that Victoria’s photography is formulaic. But it isn’t. What was immediately apparent to me when I saw her work for the first time was that there was a lot of in-betweenness in her photos. Her sister Carmen and brother Lucas caught in the silent moments of Mallorca summers. New York college girls sitting in the backseat of the bus, clearly sharing juicy information with each other as they go to a party. Women sunbathing and chitchatting on a small rock in the middle of the Adriatic Sea in Croatia.

Victoria tells me that other people describe her photography as quiet and unflashy. A fair statement, I would say, but I think there is also something profoundly powerful about those liminal moments that Victoria captures. And that’s because in many cases those liminal moments are happening in very intimate settings, ones that clearly give a rich background story to her subjects. Rooms, kitchens, beds. Backseats of the bus. An occupied rock in the middle of the sea.

“I think you’d call it environmental portraiture,” she tells me. “I think I like it because it reveals so much about the person. I remember, back in college I did this project of photographing girls at Columbia in their dorm rooms. You could walk into a room and see that the person has a mattress on the floor, not on the bed. That in itself already tells you a lot.”

“So, how did you end up in California after all this?” I ask her.

“Well, I didn’t. I first took a year off.”

Duality — Self-portrait, Courtesy of Victoria Campa.

Victoria didn’t join the corporate world after college. She instead signed a contract with Teach for America to become a teacher for underprivileged kids in an impoverished Californian school. But she first took a year off, bought a one-way ticket to Asia, and spent half a year traveling around India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. The second half of the year, she went to South America, traveling around Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia.

“What was that like?” I ask.

“Sounds super corny,” she answers, “but it changed my life. That’s the year I grew into myself. I was twenty two at the time, I was a full-time backpacker and I was working in hostels for free in exchange for getting housing. I was really burnt out after college, wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't want to sit in an office doing a 9-to-5 job. I wanted to extricate myself from the bubble of the rat race and have a different experience. It was intense in many ways.”

Her parents worried but there was nothing they could do. And Victoria loved it. She made two good friends from this experience, a policeman from the UK and a barber from Switzerland. She fell in love particularly with India, and even returned the following year for one month, during which she met a guy and started a three year-long relationship. It was a jam-packed period of wonderful intensity, but even that didn’t prepare her for what was to come once she moved to San Jose, California and started her Teach for America gig.

Victoria suddenly found herself in the center of immigrant experiences that are so often referenced in American public discourse but rarely actually experienced by those who reference them. Not the immigrant experiences of someone like myself, who came to the United States in search of a higher-quality life, but of people who had to leave their countries. In Victoria’s case, that meant low-income kids from Mexico whose parents were working multiple jobs, often living in dire conditions, just to provide a better and safer future for their families.

“I mean, I just was not emotionally prepared for all of that,” she adds. “It’s one thing when you hear about these experiences in the news. But I was experiencing it full-time for two years. It gave me so much insight into the inequities that exist in education and beyond. It was a heartbreaking, challenging, life-changing experience.”

There was no time to overthink any of this though. She had to come up with all the curriculum, she had to learn how to make decisions quickly, and she had to be there for the kids when no one else in their lives could. I think it’s useful to calibrate what this really meant. Victoria was twenty three at the time, when most people she knew were moving to big cities, getting their first corporate jobs, going out and partying. Meanwhile, she was giving all of herself to these kids.

One particular heartbreaking experience left an indelible mark on her.

“I had this ten-year old kid whose reading skills were at kindergarten level,” she says. “Very physically violent, throwing tantrums, and just generally struggling. It was challenging to have him around other kids, so I knew I had to build a relationship with his family, and I was really invested in wanting to help him and his family as well.”

The first time Victoria went to his family’s place after school, she realized that his home was shared with two other families. Space was tight, privacy nonexistent. He and his two brothers lived with their single mom in bunk beds.

Things got especially tough during the Covid-19 pandemic. Victoria was actively teaching through this globally unnerving period, and what she was experiencing with her students did not reflect what the public—and often privileged—narrative around online education was at the time.

“Online school worked for kids whose environments allowed for this type of learning and whose parents were also able to work from home. But not for my students. They couldn’t afford the right setup in their homes, and if you are a parent working multiple jobs to support your family, you don’t have the time to stay at home and help your kids learn. These kids literally lost a year of education. The pandemic really exposed the underlying inequality in American society.”

Still, what Victoria cherishes about this experience is not just the harsh reality of the immigrant experience but also the unparalleled capacity for love that her students showed. Victoria did her best to create a loving environment for them, and she feels that the kids knew they were safe with her and loved by her. In turn, they started to share that love with each other.

After her two-year contract with Teach For America ended, she decided it was time to try something new. She wanted to live in a city again and to have time to pursue her passion for photography. The two years of teaching were all-consuming, and while she was able to absorb the world around her, she didn’t have the time or the emotional capacity to produce what she saw in that world. She tells me that, for this part of the story, she wants to show me her first apartment in The Mission, right next to the Zuckerberg General Hospital.

“I didn’t even see this place in person,” she says when we get to the building. “I knew one of the guys who lived here, saw some photos, and decided I would move in.”

She moved there at the end of the first pandemic summer. I tell her that I can’t imagine what that must have been like. San Francisco was so desolate and eerie in that period that even those of us who were already living in the city, with established social circles, were losing our minds.

The emphasis there should be on I cannot imagine. But Victoria found a way. About five months after she moved to the city, she started working at BetterUp, where the two of us would meet the next summer. She completely switched gears and found a role in recruiting, inspired by the mission of helping find diverse talent for a company at the intersection of psychology, learning, and development. What’s even more impressive is that she also found a way to create an entirely new world in San Francisco outside of work, one that didn’t previously exist.

“I was really disappointed by the mainstream photography scene in the city,” she tells me as we start walking away from her old apartment toward Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, close to her current apartment. “It was good photography but it was all the same street photography done by skaters and surfer dudes.”

And this is the piece of the story that shows how much of a force Victoria really is. Many people come to the city and complain about the uniformity of San Francisco’s social circles or cultural efforts. Very few do something about it. But Victoria did. One day, she reached out to Malindi Walker, another SF-based photographer, on Instagram and the two agreed to meet up for drinks.

“We immediately clicked,” Victoria says. “She shared my views, and we realized that we could create the space that was missing in the city.”

And thus, Counter Collective was born. A contrarian artistic network, made for those who are typically excluded from creative spaces, Victoria and Malindi’s co-creation quickly became a magnet for local creators and artists.

I remember walking for the first time into one of their exhibitions, when they had a jam-packed launch party at the Wave Collective Space in Lower Haight, and seeing Victoria hold court as she conversed with the attendees right in the center of the gallery, beneath a shimmering disco ball. The same analytical, operational, and self-effacing Victoria who talked numbers with me at work. It was a moment that inspired me greatly. Because what I saw was not just a coworker with a cool hobby, but someone who had so much drive to elevate her passion into something bigger than herself and being so humble about it.

We reach the Alamo Drafthouse theater, an important centerpiece for Victoria in the city because she is a cinephile and loves coming here to see new screenings. While she is telling me about some of her favorite photographers who’ve inspired her, from Quentin De Briey and Lee Friedlander to Sally Mann and Alessandra Sanguinetti, I jot down in my notes the phrase “courage vs. tech.”

After hearing her story, it’s completely sensical to me that she would end her career in tech. Startups are exciting and there is certainly a sense of uncertainty about them, but it is a corporate career after all, with clearly defined rules and metrics. It’s safe.

Victoria, on the other hand, operates from a place of courage. She is someone who takes risks and follows her instinct, no matter how lucrative or unlucrative something is, which means she is an artist at her core. An artist with sharp analytical and operational skills, but an artist nonetheless.

Three weeks later, Duality is exhibited at the Wave Collective Space. It’s Victoria’s last exhibition in San Francisco, and I am following the updates on her Instagram story because I am not in the city that weekend. I can see photos of me positioned next to the photos of her other friends, and everyone’s handwritten notes on their dualities forming a chessboard pattern. I smile because I now recognize Victoria’s need for order in this meticulous arrangement.

A month after the exhibit, when Victoria is already en route to her next chapter of life, I finally get the answer on what Victoria was doing with all those cameras when we met at her place to do the photoshoot. A clip shows up on her Instagram, a video collage of recordings of all the Duality participants, some adjusting for the camera, some talking to Victoria, or in my case, holding an iPhone and figuring out the best pose for a selfie. It’s the unassuming yet powerful Victoria at work again, giving others the space to express themselves without them being aware she is out there creating a snapshot of their essence.

Duality, Courtesy of Victoria Campa.